The "secret" mission of our DBIT graduates

On the morning of 09 Nov 2012 (Friday), a group of fifteen former Diploma in Business IT (DBIT) students who had graduated from SP a few years ago made their way back to their alma mater.   Upon their arrival, they were ushered into the DMIT (School of Digital Media and Infocomm Technology) Conference Room where they held a private conversation behind closed walls.

You are probably wondering: Why were they back? And why so secretive? :)

Well....the answers are right below!



DBIT graduates in a "secret" conversation

Alright, here's the answer to the "not-so-secret" reason why they were here.

Singapore Polytechnic (SP) upholds a tradition whereby we place heavy emphasis on the quality and usefulness of the course curriculum we offer to each batch of our diploma students.

To ensure this standard is maintained, every five years, the SP level Organisational Development (OD) Department would co-ordinate an event known as the "5-year course review" where we would invite our former graduates, a panel of distinguished professionals from the universities and industry as well as current students to share their  valuable feedback on how the Course Management Team (CMT) can make improvements to the course.

Justin

This year, with the help of our CMT member, SP lecturer, Justin Monreal, we managed to get several students who have either gone on to universities like NUS, NTU, SMU and SIM or started working to come back to talk to us!

We were also glad to welcome back some enterprising graduates who are now running or started their own business! :)

Brillyn - One of our graduates
who is now helping to run a family business

Suresh - who got 50k funding through
the support of SP's entrepreneurship initiatives
and now has his own company

We are so grateful to these graduates who came back despite their busy schedules at university or work commitments to give us their important insights on how they benefitted from the course or the modules or skills they think the DBIT course should teach!

There were many interesting snippets of "insider information" shared at the session, but as I have mentioned earlier, this is a highly confidential conversation so I am not at liberty to disclose here! ;)

But what we are glad to share is that our DBIT graduates universally agreed on one thing -- being trained in both business and IT skills really helped them alot in both their university studies and their work.

For those who went on to study a degree course, the business knowledge plus IT knowledge made them stand out among their peers who were only trained in one area.  For those who went on to work, they managed to be very productive because nowadays, almost every job requires IT skills, so even when they were in non-IT jobs, they could do things really fast with their IT knowledge! :)

The happy faces of our Year 1 and Year 2 students.
On the left is Professor Kam from SMU who "interviewed" them

Besides our former graduates, we also invited 15 current students from Year 1 to Year 3 to let us know how they like the course and what are the improvements they wish to see!

Again, the information they shared with us I cannot reveal here, but one really happy thing that all of us were so pleased to hear is that the students said if they were given a chance to choose a course all over again, they would still choose DBIT! That speaks volumes of how they like the course, doesn't it! :)

If you are a DBIT graduate or student reading this blog entry, do drop us a note if you have more suggestions on how we can improve!  If you are a secondary school student looking for a great course to continue your tertiary studies, talk to us and find out why the Diploma in Business IT is going to be a great  choice for you! :)