Field Service Project + System Design Project

Over my fourth year in my DDP program, I was involved in Field Service Project (Biz) and System Design Project (Engineering). It felt like two part-time internships, albeit less strenuous than an actual internship. The purpose of both of this was to give students real-world practical experience and contributes to a significant amount of MCs for students.

FSP4003 Field Service Project (8MCs)

Thoughts before: Working with a startup focusing on the financial industry on how to gamify the risk assessment process

General overview: This is basically a part-time internship with a company, to help them with a project over 1 or 2 semesters (depending on your project). Depending on the topic and the company, you could be doing marketing, financial modeling, research or really anything else under the sun. You could also propose a project with a company you have contacts in (perhaps from your previous internship). It attempts to expose you to the real world, but being business students, I'm pretty sure you already have internships under your belt at this point in time. Nonetheless, gaining more experiences is always a plus.

Format: Final team report (45%), presentation to the company (25%), peer review (10%), learning journal (20%). Basically, listen to your company and professor and put in the effort to deliver above expectations and you'll score well.

My opinion: A good module that gives an avenue for students to learn and apply new skills in an unstructured environment. I was attached to a financial startup, making things even more unstructured. Our project was basically to study the methods used to evaluate risk behaviors and come up with a model to classify risk appetite. We basically had to study tons of behavioral theories and decided to settle on cumulative prospect theory proposed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Thereafter, we build a game prototype and tested it on various participants and came up with several models based upon machine learning algorithms. A very technical project for my team and me but it was really fun and we enjoyed the process (We all had an engineering background so it was good). 

Difficulty: Medium

Grade obtained: A+

IE3100 Systems Design Project (12MCs)

Thoughts before: Coding coding coding

General overview: Similar to the Field Service Project, this is somewhat a year-long internship with a company as well. Supposedly, we are to apply what we have learned in ISE to the project and value-add to a company that is assigned to us.

Format: Interim report (10%), Final component (90%). 

The final component consists of individual working attitude (15%), project execution and achievement (25%), oral presentation (10%), report writing (15%), case study & teaching notes (15%), project poster (5%), video (5%).

My opinion: Good idea, horrible execution. I was looking forward to this module seeing that I was not involved in vacation internship project or industrial attachment (You get to skip this as a double degree student). I initially thought it was a good avenue to apply ISE concepts in a meaningful project. However, the professor in charge of this project was unclear about how he wanted to run this project, and what the deliverables were. He basically wanted us to cold call (yes, like those annoying sales calls you get from time to time) random companies to launch his own business ideas. Did not really learn much, if at all, and mostly spend the time doing a lot of random stuff that is not ISE related.

Difficulty: Nil

Grade obtained: B+