Joyce Tay Zhi Yue
Contents
About Joyce
Why TSM South Korea?
I have heard about TSM Korea since I was in year 2 and have wanted to join since then. No other TSM enticed me, not Europe, not America (I did not raise up my hand when Prof Ben did a poll in class on a TSM to America), only Korea did. Lol. Basically there are a lot of things about the Korean culture that attracted me. The most obvious ones are of course their fabulous kpop, food, fashion, heritage and oh-so-beautiful four season landscapes!
Delving deeper, I have many questions about how the young people in that country went into the journey of entrepreneurship. From what I know, Korea is generally still a patriarchal and conservative society; it must have been easier to join one of the conglomerates than to convince their parents to support their entrepreneurial decisions. Still, despite these, Korea has its fair bit of success stories especially in the aspect of technological innovations. It would really be great to be able to find out first-hand, how their company started, what was the vision they had in mind back then, and also the various challenges faced.
I also observed that Koreans are generally very hardworking people and they take great pride and integrity in their work, to the extent that a sloppy work done would be considered shameful. I noticed this during my 6 months stint at British American Tobacco (Singapore) before admitting into SMU (see pic below). There were many Koreans there, they were very nice and had great working attitudes (working till mid-night that kind). I have very good impressions of Koreans and would like to have the opportunity to interact and learn from them during the TSM trip.
Internship Opportunities
There are no ideal firms that I wish to join, but two companies came to my mind as I thought about this question. They are LG and Nexon. I used to really adore their products!
I still remember LG introduced many pretty and innovative phones, from the Chocolate phones to the Ice Cream phones, and then there was this really cool transparent phone. Back then, based on the quality of their phone, it would be hard to compete with the big mobile players but they made a great decision by entering the market through attractive and novel physical appearances of the phone. Though, their phones are not very impressive now, they are still a big player in home appliances so it would be a good experience to work there.
Nexon distributed many addictive massive multiplayer online role-playing games; Maple Story was one of them (though Wizet was the developer). When I was playing their games I used to wonder how did they conceptualize the entire game? What were the processes involved? There are so many aspects to think about, the characters, the story line, the setting, the ultimate goal, the progressive nature of everything (from levels to monsters to equipment etc), and most importantly how to make the game require effort but yet in a way that does not turn people off? Probably working there would answer some questions that I had.
Starting a business
- What types of business interest you? All
- What plan do you have in starting a business? (list existing business)
Past Experiences
- Describe your past experience (entrepreneurship, or works in start ups etc
