1415T1g1 Silicon Vallley/Participant Information/Derrick Ng
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Derrick Ng
Academic Year: 3
Degree: BSc in Information Systems Management
2nd Major: ABT - Technopreneurship
Hobbies: Watching variety shows, movies and comedies for the laughs, games OR searching for them, brainstorming for ideas(or otherwise known as daydreaming to everyone else), solving problems, singing
Past Commitments: Voix - Marketing innovateIT'14 - Finance Project M.U.S.E OCSP to Cambodia - Logistics
Why TSM Silicon Valley?
Silicon Valley is basically the home to majority of the most amazing IT companies, anybody who has interests in IT or businesses would definitely like to visit it once to learn and experience something there. Just knowing of the TSM to Silicon Valley made me really excited - images of visiting the giant tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft kept flowing through my head. To be able to take a look at the work environment/atmosphere and even to learn something from some of the greatest tech companies of this age would be such an incredible experience.
Internship Opportunities
Personally, the most interesting internship would be one with Google because of its very famous work environment. In fact, a job with Google would be like the dream job. However, I think that it would also be rather interesting to intern at Dropbox as well. Dropbox was a simple solution to a simple problem that was not even that much of a pain to people in the first place. Yet it has also come really far - many copycats have been spurned from dropbox because everyone can see how it is such a simple, useful and amazing idea. It would be a great learning experience to see how this simple idea has been made into such a huge business, what people do in the company everyday, and how they can keep growing.
Starting a business
Game Development Web Design(Both UI and UX) IT Solutions Digital Marketing
In future I would like to have my own company that would most probably focus on mobile applications. It is amazing how even simple games like "flappy bird" and "make it rain" can make so much money every day despite being so simplistic. I would possibly go into creating a game development company which allows me to use my passion in designing as I hope to be able to put that into the games that I will make. Hearing about the stories from interns of marketing companies and gaming companies and what they do fuels my beliefs that it is very possible to make a living out of the things that I enjoy.
Past Experience
I have not worked at startups but I have interned as a Management Trainee at a small company called Standard Heat Treatment Pte Ltd prior to becoming a student at SMU. Small companies like these in Tuas tend to have most of their work/documents done in a paper-based format. While I was interning there, I noticed a lot of bottlenecks and because I was getting annoyed with them and I wanted to make my own job easier, I came up with ideas to reduce those bottlenecks. I tried to create something useful for the executives and even helped them to create a simple inventory management system with the use of excel sheets and bar code scanners. It was rather beneficial for them but without enough technical knowledge back then, I was only capable of delivering a simple solution and hardly knew what excel could do. However, it helped them a lot as it made the problem of bottlenecks much more manageable. The experience led me to know that even though everybody knows what technology can achieve, not everybody has the means to obtain it and that there are more people whose jobs can be made better with technology. Even simple ideas and systems will be useful when used in the right place.
