The NUS MBA Diaries: Life Through Joshua Macapugay’s Lens
June: The Email, the Farewells, and the Full Circle
Every good story has that one chapter where the threads come together — and for this MBA, June was it. The month everything had been quietly building toward — the case prep, the pivot sessions, the early mornings, the leaps — finally paid off, and the chapter that defined my first year closed on a high. Here’s how it went.
The Biggest News Yet: I’m Joining McKinsey!
Let’s not bury the lede. In June, I received the email I’d been working toward all year: an offer to join McKinsey & Company as a Junior Associate.
I must have read “We are thrilled to extend you an offer” a dozen times before it sank in. Months of quiet groundwork compressed into one notification — the case practice that filled my May evenings, the Solve assessment back in March, the PEI stories drafted and redrafted, the interviews balanced against internship deadlines and everything else this year threw at the calendar.
If you’ve been reading along, you saw the trail: “Pivot into Consulting” in March, the mysterious discipline in May. This was where it was all pointing. The pivot I started this MBA to make is no longer a plan — it’s signed.
What I’ll remember most isn’t the email itself, but the proof underneath it: that a kid from Manila could dream this big, bet on himself, take the long way through business school, and land exactly where he aimed. To everyone who ran cases with me, listened to my stories for the fifteenth time, and talked me down from overthinking — this one’s partly yours.
Wrapping Up at L’Oréal
June also closed another chapter: my last day at L’Oréal.
The send-off got me emotional in ways I didn’t expect. My desk on the final day looked like a care package exploded — chocolates, snacks, and handwritten cards from the team, including one note thanking me for energy I didn’t know anyone noticed, ending with “all the best for your marathon :)”. There was even a L’Oréal for Youth “Graduation Day” card, because this company genuinely knows how to make interns feel like alumni rather than temporary labor.
Looking back on the internship: I came in to learn how a global beauty giant runs digital and e-commerce across a region, and left with much more — new experiences under my belt, bosses who trusted me with real regional work, and teammates who turned into friends. The farewell photos by the “L’Oréal for the Future” wall, everyone throwing up L-shaped hands, captured it: serious work, unserious people, in the best way.
Because I’m worth it? No — because they are. Thank you, team.
Coffee with Edy Widjaja
One of June’s quieter highlights: a coffee chat with Edy Widjaja, former Bain Senior Partner — the kind of conversation that compresses years of hard-won perspective into an hour.
Talking with someone who spent decades at the top of the consulting industry, right as I’m about to enter it, was equal parts exciting and grounding. The insights that stuck: the consultants who last aren’t the smartest in the room, they’re the ones clients trust with bad news; your first two years are for learning how to think, not building a personal brand; and the skills that compound are the unglamorous ones — listening, writing clearly, following through.
Walking into McKinsey with that advice in my back pocket feels like a head start. Grateful for the generosity — the SEA professional community really does pay it forward.
The Season of Goodbyes
June’s social calendar had one recurring theme: farewells. As the MBA winds down, the cohort is scattering — new jobs, home countries, next adventures — and every week brought another dinner that doubled as a goodbye.
The instax camera kept working overtime. Long tables at Italian restaurants, wine racks in the background, polaroids passed around while still developing — tiny physical receipts of a year that went by too fast. There’s a particular bittersweetness to MBA friendships: the intensity compresses years of closeness into months, and then everyone leaves at once. The consolation is the map. I now have couches to crash on across a dozen countries, and they have lumpia waiting whenever they land in Manila.
We came as strangers, we leave as each other’s people. Not a bad trade for one year.
Full Circle: LYT Faculty Training
And then, the perfect closer: I spent the last weekend of June at the Launch Your Transformation (LYT) faculty training, preparing to serve as an assistant facilitator when the incoming batch of MBAs arrives.
LYT was one of the first things I experienced when I started this program — and soon I’ll be on the other side of the room, helping the new cohort navigate the same beginning. Sitting through the two-day training, surrounded by faculty and facilitators, I kept flashing back to how uncertain I felt walking into my own launch a year ago. If I could tell that version of me anything, it’s that every uncomfortable leap this year — the pivots, the assessments, the goodbyes — would be worth it.
The new batch hasn’t arrived yet, but I already know what I want them to feel in that room. There’s no cleaner way to close this chapter than that: the student preparing to become, in a small way, the guide.
Closing the Chapter
This month closed the arc that defined my first year: the pivot is secured, the internship is complete, and the question I carried into this MBA — can I actually make this leap? — has its answer, in writing, signed.
But the story isn’t over. There are still a few months of MBA left, and for the first time in a long time, they’re mine to enjoy without a recruiting process humming in the background. A final stretch of classes, an LYT to facilitate, friendships to soak in before everyone scatters, and a certain marathon in Sydney to train for. The pressure chapter is done. The savoring chapter starts now.
May: Frameworks, Farewell to UTown, and Lumpia Diplomacy
May was a transition month. The semester proper ended, the special term began, I traded my dorm keys for a new neighborhood, and my evenings quietly filled up with case frameworks. Less fireworks than April, more foundation-laying — the kind of month you appreciate in hindsight. Here’s how it went.
Case Practice: The Quiet Grind
Not everything worth writing about photographs well. Most of my May happened at a desk: regular case practice and preparation for McKinsey interviews.
The setup became a ritual. Laptop open to McKinsey’s interview coaching resources, spiral notebook filling up with issue trees — how to price a product, whether to make an investment, how to respond to a competitive threat. A growing stack of pages mapping PEI stories to the attributes they’re meant to show. Repeat, refine, repeat.
What case prep actually teaches you, beyond the frameworks, is a way of thinking: clarify before you structure, align on the key question before you dive, and always know what would change your answer. Somewhere around the twentieth case, the structure stops being something you build and starts being something you see. The parallels to marathon training aren’t lost on me — nobody sees the base miles, but the base miles are the whole thing.
Where all this is heading, I’ll keep to myself for now. But if you notice this blog’s author has been unusually disciplined lately, this is why.
Goodbye UTown, Hello Tiong Bahru
May also meant moving out — my entire Singapore life compressed back into two suitcases, a duffel bag, a beanbag, and one very overstuffed IKEA bag. Watching a year of UTown living shrink into a luggage pile on the floor was more emotional than I expected. That room saw finals stress, recruiting calls, late-night assignment pushes, and a lot of instant noodles.
The destination softened the blow: Tiong Bahru, one of Singapore’s most charming neighborhoods — art deco walk-ups, a legendary hawker centre, indie bookshops, and more good coffee per square meter than anywhere I’ve lived. Going from dorm life to a real neighborhood feels like a preview of the next chapter: less student, more resident.
There’s also something fitting about the timing. The MBA is entering its final stretch, and the move made that tangible in a way no academic calendar could. New keys, new commute, new local kopi order. Chapter turning, literally.
Lumpia Diplomacy
May’s social calendar had a theme: milestones. New houses to warm, friends flying off to exchange terms and new jobs, chapters closing everywhere you looked. So we did what any self-respecting group of friends does — we gathered, repeatedly, and we ate.
My contribution to one of these: a lumpia-making session. For the uninitiated, lumpia are Filipino spring rolls, and making them is a team sport — one bowl of filling, a stack of wrappers, and everyone around the table learning the roll-tuck-seal technique with wildly varying success rates. There’s no faster way to bond a group than collective mediocrity at a shared task. The first batch looked like abstract art. By the last batch, I was genuinely proud of my students.
The spread at these gatherings told its own story — a proper potluck United Nations, with dishes from across the cohort’s home countries crowding the table, krupuk bags torn open, and an instax camera making the rounds to document it all. One polaroid from that night is already pinned by my window in the new place.
Teaching friends from a dozen countries how to roll lumpia, in a Singapore flat, to celebrate everyone’s next chapters — that’s the MBA experience no brochure captures. The food was good. The reason for gathering was better.
Saturdays with Prof Kulwant
The special term brought a highlight I didn’t expect to love this much: Corporate Strategy with Prof Kulwant Singh, every Saturday.
Yes, Saturday classes. No, I’m not complaining — because Prof Kulwant’s sessions are the kind that remind you why you came back to school. Decades of studying strategy in Asia, distilled into discussions that constantly poke holes in the frameworks we’ve all been trained to worship. The recurring theme: context beats playbook. What works in one market fails in another, and the real skill is knowing why.
He also did something I’ve never seen a professor do: he gave away his books. Brought a stack to class — Global Strategy, The New Silk Road, and more — and handed them out, free. In an age of paywalled everything, a professor personally passing his library forward felt almost radical. The man teaches generosity the same way he teaches strategy: by demonstration.
Between the case prep on weeknights and strategy classes on Saturdays, May turned into an accidental masterclass in structured thinking from two very different angles. My brain is tired in the best way.
Onward to June
May didn’t have April’s fireworks, and that was the point. A month of moving boxes, issue trees, Saturday lectures, and spring rolls — quiet investments in whatever comes next. Some months announce themselves. Others just build.
June, time to show what all this groundwork was for.
April: Ad Breaks, Birthday Cake, and a Ticket to Sydney
April had the energy of a season finale. The Marketing Club wrapped its year, the semester sprinted to a close, a race I’ve been dreaming about got confirmed, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I got a year older. Here’s how it went.
Ad Olympics: Our Final Act
The Marketing Club closed out its year with the Ad Olympics — Superbowl Edition, our second and final event as the core team. If the AI in Marketing workshop last month was the serious sibling, this was the fun one: an evening built around the greatest ads ever made, Superbowl-style.
Picture the MBA lounge turned living room — couches pulled together, snacks and drinks everywhere, classmates (plus one very chill toddler with headphones) watching iconic ads on the big screen and debating what makes them work. For a room full of marketers and marketers-in-training, arguing over whether an ad earned its fame is basically a contact sport.
Running two events in one year with this core team has been one of the quiet highlights of my MBA. Organizing looks unglamorous up close — booking rooms, chasing RSVPs, hauling food boxes — but standing in the back watching a full room enjoy something you built never gets old. Grateful to the team; we ended the year the way all good campaigns should: on a high, with the audience wanting more.
Meet the Merck Inhouse Consulting Team
Continuing my consulting deep-dive from last month, I joined the NUS MBA Consulting Club’s session with the Merck Inhouse Consulting team — Alberto Miranda Ordono (Head of the IC-APAC office), Ramkumar Mohan (Senior Manager), and Poornima Ambalavanan (Associate from the GoGlobal Graduate Program).
Inhouse consulting is a corner of the industry I hadn’t fully appreciated. Same toolkit as external firms — structured problem-solving, stakeholder management, senior-leader exposure — but pointed at one company’s problems, with the luxury of seeing recommendations through to implementation instead of handing over a deck and flying out.
The interactive bit made it real: we worked through an actual GGP-style challenge on redesigning a fragmented employee HR experience at global scale — how to prioritize the problems, what to build, how to roll it out worldwide, and how to drive adoption. It’s one thing to hear about internal strategy work; it’s another to sit with the problem for twenty minutes and realize how many trade-offs hide inside “just make it simpler.”
Every one of these sessions sharpens my picture of the consulting landscape a little more. Filing this one away.
Sydney, Confirmed
Then, an email that made my week: registration confirmed for the 2026 TCS Sydney Marathon.
For context: I’m chasing all six Abbott World Marathon Majors, and Chicago last year was my first star. Sydney is next — the newest Major, and conveniently the closest one to this side of the world. Screenshot saved, confirmation number memorized, training block mentally drafted before I’d even closed the email.
There’s something about a race confirmation that changes your relationship with the calendar. Every long run between now and race day suddenly has a purpose. Between MBA deadlines, club events, and everything else, the early-morning miles are about to get very intentional. Two stars soon, four to go.
Birthday, Singapore Edition
April also brought my first birthday in Singapore — the first one I’ve celebrated outside the Philippines, actually.
Birthdays abroad are a strange equation: you subtract the family traditions and the childhood friends, and you find out what fills the space. The answer, it turns out, is the people who’ve become your Singapore family — a small dinner, a chocolate cake with more candles than structural integrity, and friends who somehow already know you well enough to tease you properly.
I wore my favorite shirt, blew out the candles, and felt genuinely lucky. A year ago, most of these people were strangers. Now they’re the ones showing up with cake. If that’s not a case study in how fast the MBA compresses friendship timelines, I don’t know what is.
Semester End Party: Closing the Chapter
And then, the send-off: the semester-end party, where the cohort collectively exhaled.
The venue had everything a stressed MBA student needs to decompress: neon everywhere, an LED beer pong table (a technological upgrade nobody asked for but everyone appreciated), and a photo booth that produced instant evidence of questionable decisions. Our photo strip came out with the caption “You should smile more!” above two frames of us grinning like we hadn’t just survived a full semester of deadlines. Accurate.
What I’ll remember isn’t the games, though — it’s the feeling in the room. A semester ago, this cohort was a collection of LinkedIn profiles nervously introducing themselves. Now it’s inside jokes, photo strips, and people who’ve seen each other through recruiting stress, group project chaos, and everything in between. You don’t notice a cohort becoming a community until you’re standing in a neon-lit room realizing it already happened.
Onward to May
April closed a lot of loops: the Marketing Club’s final bow, another consulting door explored, a birthday that proved home is portable, a party that sealed the semester — and one confirmation email pointing straight at Sydney. Season one of the MBA is a wrap.
May, bring on the next arc.
March: Panels, Puzzles, and the Floor Is Actually Lava
If February was about firsts, March was about range. In one month I went from listening to founders talk about leading without a playbook, to solving a McKinsey assessment, to hopping across glowing tiles pretending the floor was molten. MBA life has no genre. Here’s how it went.
Leading Without a Playbook: International Women’s Day
The NUS MBA DEI Club kicked off the month with an International Women’s Day panel titled “Leading Without A Playbook” — and the lineup delivered on the title. Four leaders, four completely different paths: Snigdha Nandan (Executive Director at Standa
rd Chartered), Pauline Romanoff (Senior Director at Micron), Tiffany Chng (Co-Founder of Cheak), and Marie Cheong (Founding Partner of Wavemaker Impact).
What made the session land was the mix itself — banking, semiconductors, a startup founder, and climate-focused venture building, all on one stage. The common thread: none of them followed a script, because for most of their careers, there wasn’t one to follow. The playbook gets written by the people bold enough to move first.
The takeaway I keep coming back to: careers aren’t ladders, they’re terrains. You don’t climb them — you navigate them. Coming from someone mid-pivot myself, that reframe hit home.
Pivot into Consulting: A McKinsey Invitation
Mid-March brought something I’d been quietly working toward: an invitation from McKinsey to join their “Pivot into Consulting as a Junior Associate” session for Southeast Asia — including a crack at Solve, their assessment.
The session pulled back the curtain on what the junior associate path in Southeast Asia looks like — the kind of problems you’d work on, the pace, the people. What struck me most was how deliberately McKinsey talks about pivots. The room was full of people like me: marketers, operators, engineers, all mid-career and wondering if consulting is the next chapter. The message was clear — the pivot isn’t a detour, it’s the point.
Then came Solve. Without giving away the game (literally — it’s confidential), it’s unlike any test I’ve taken. It’s less about what you know and more about how you think: pattern recognition, decision-making under time pressure, adapting when the rules shift mid-way. You can’t cram for it. You can only show up with a clear head and trust the way you reason.
No spoilers on where this leads. But March me was taking notes, and future me will report back.
The Floor Is Lava (No, Really)
Because not everything in March needed a name tag: a group of us went to play Floor Is Lava — the childhood game, now industrialized into a room with glowing tiles, disappearing platforms, and zero mercy.
Here’s what nobody tells you: the game is 20% agility and 80% betrayal. Alliances formed and dissolved within minutes. People you’d trust with your group project grade will absolutely watch you plummet onto a “lava” tile without blinking. I learned who my real friends are, and the answer is: situational.
It’s also a surprisingly good workout — all that hopping, lunging, and panic-balancing adds up. Somewhere between the marathon training and the three-legged race last month, I seem to be accidentally building a portfolio of extremely niche athletic experiences. My Garmin didn’t know how to classify this one.
Silly night, great company, calves sore for two days. Ten out of ten.
AI in Marketing: Our Club Takes the Stage
This one was personal: the AI in Marketing workshop, organized by our core team at the NUS MBA Marketing Club, featuring Jim Tan, Director of Growth Marketing at AirOps.
Being on the organizing side changes how you experience an event. You’re not just absorbing content — you’re watching the room, checking the QR code works, making sure the food shows up, and hoping the speaker’s laptop cooperates (it mostly did). Seeing classmates fill the seats at NUS on a Monday evening for a session we put together was genuinely satisfying.
The content earned the turnout. Jim’s core argument: AI is the biggest shift marketing has seen, and the marketers who win won’t be the ones who resist it or blindly adopt it — they’ll be the ones who redesign their workflows around it. He walked through mindset shifts for the AI era, how marketing roles are evolving, and hands-on demos of AI-driven workflows. As someone who spent years in growth and GTM roles, it was equal parts exciting and humbling: half the playbook I built my career on is being rewritten in real time. Better to be in the room where the rewriting happens.
VC Night: The Multiplier Effect
March closed with VC Night, hosted by the NUS MBA Entrepreneurship Club under their “Multiplier Effect” banner — and they didn’t hold back on the lineup. Ten investors across the Southeast Asian venture landscape in one room: general partners, principals, and investment professionals from firms like Gharage Ventures, TNB Aura, East Ventures, Openspace Capital, Monk Hill Ventures, GenZero, and Wavemaker.
The value of a night like this isn’t the panel talk — it’s the unfiltered conversations after. Ask ten VCs what they look for and you’ll get ten different answers, but the patterns emerge fast: founder obsession over founder polish, distribution over product elegance, and a ruthless focus on whether the market is actually there. Having sat on the operator side at Grab watching the funded and the unfunded, hearing the investor side of the logic filled in a picture I’d only ever seen half of.
Also a good reminder that Southeast Asia’s venture scene is small in the best way — everyone knows everyone, and the person you chat with over canapés tonight might be across the table from you in a few years.
Onward to April
March covered a lot of ground: leadership lessons from women writing their own playbooks, a foot in the consulting door, AI rewriting my old profession, a masterclass in SEA venture — and a night of hopping across fake lava with people I’ll know for the rest of my life. If February was about settling in, March was about opening doors and seeing which ones open back.
April, no pressure, but the bar is rising.
February: Tossed Salads, Tied Legs, and a Ticket Home
February moved fast. One month in, and it already had a bit of everything — a questionable athletic performance, a new tradition, a first at work, a beach day, and a much-needed dose of home. The kind of month that reminds you why you signed up for all of this: new experiences on one side, familiar faces on the other, and barely enough time to breathe in between. Here’s how it went.
MBA Olympics: A Study in Height Differentials
The month kicked off with the MBA Olympics — the cohort’s excuse to trade case discussions for actual competition. My main event: the three-legged race, partnered with Tom, my Australian classmate.
Now, I train for marathons. I run high mileage every week. None of that matters when your left leg is strapped to a man roughly a full head taller than you, whose single stride equals about 1.5 of yours. The three-legged race, it turns out, is not a running event. It’s a negotiation. Tom’s stride wanted to eat the course in ten steps; my legs were on a completely different cadence. Watching us find a shared rhythm must have looked like a physics experiment gone wrong.
But that’s the fun of it — you can’t win a three-legged race on individual talent. You win by syncing up, calling the rhythm out loud, and committing to every step together. Somewhere before the finish line, we actually found a groove. I’ll leave the final result out of the official record, but the height differential made us the most entertaining pair on the course, and I’d defend that title anywhere.
There’s probably a lesson in there about adapting to your partner’s pace. Mostly, though, it was just a genuinely good time — exactly what a cohort needs before deadlines start piling up.
First Chinese New Year in Singapore (and My First Lo Hei)
I’ve celebrated Chinese New Year before, but never in Singapore — and that’s a completely different experience. The city transforms: Chinatown glows red and gold, entire streets smell like bak kwa (there are hour-long queues for it, and yes, it’s worth it), and mandarin oranges appear everywhere, always in pairs.
The centerpiece was the CNY dinner hosted by the NUS MBA CSC Club — my crash course in local traditions, headlined by my first-ever Lo Hei.
For the uninitiated (as I was): Lo Hei is the tossing of yusheng, a raw fish salad where every ingredient carries a meaning — fish for abundance, carrots for luck, pomelo for prosperity, golden crackers for wealth. Each ingredient is added with an auspicious phrase, then everyone gathers around, chopsticks ready, and tosses the whole thing as high as possible. The higher the toss, the greater the fortune ahead.
It is chaotic. It is messy. There was definitely food on the table, and possibly on some classmates. It was also one of the warmest moments of my MBA so far — a table full of people from a dozen countries, most of us learning the tradition in real time, all shouting “Huat ah!” together. That’s the quiet magic of an MBA cohort: everyone is far from home, so everyone’s traditions become everyone else’s.
If the height of the toss really does predict the year ahead, we’re all in for a big one.
My First AMAX at L’Oréal
February also marked my first AMAX at L’Oréal — my first real look at how a regional organization aligns at scale.
Working across SAPMENA means projects and plans don’t live in one place. They’re spread across markets, teams, brands, and timelines, each with its own priorities. AMAX is where those threads get pulled together into one coherent regional picture — and this time, I got to play a part: supporting my bosses in consolidating and connecting projects and plans across the region.
It sounds simple. It is not. Bringing regional plans together means reconciling different formats, assumptions, and levels of readiness — then shaping it into a narrative that holds up in the room. A few takeaways:
Preparation is everything. The polish you see in a regional alignment moment is built on weeks of groundwork and versions upon versions of decks. What looks effortless never is.
Context is a superpower. Having worked in Southeast Asian markets before, I could add texture to conversations that would otherwise stay abstract.
Trust is given in rooms, not titles. Being pulled into the process as someone still relatively new meant a lot. Grateful to my bosses for bringing me into the room instead of leaving me at the edge of it.
If January was about finding my footing, February was about proving I could carry weight.
Beach Day at Palawan: The Cohort Unplugs
After the intensity of AMAX, the timing couldn’t have been better: a full day at Palawan Beach in Sentosa with the cohort, doing absolutely nothing important.
No agenda, no networking objectives. Just sand, sea, and classmates in their most unproductive state — which, for a group of MBAs, is rare and worth documenting. We swam, lazed around, crossed the suspension bridge to the islet that claims to be the southernmost point of continental Asia (a title I accept without further due diligence), and let an entire day pass without a single laptop.
Conversations wandered into home countries, families, and post-MBA dreams instead of frameworks and deliverables. These are the days that actually build a cohort — not the group projects, but the shared hours where nobody’s performing. Highly recommend scheduling your beach days immediately after your big deliverables. The contrast does something good for the soul.
Home for a Bit: Catching Up with the Grabbers
To cap off the month, I flew home for a short trip — and made sure to catch up with my old team from Grab.
There’s something grounding about sitting down with people who knew you before the MBA, before the internship, before the new logos on the résumé. No context-setting, no small-talk warm-up. The conversations picked up exactly where they left off: what’s changed at Grab, what everyone’s working on, who’s moved where. A few hours of old war stories and trading notes on where our careers are heading.
What struck me most is how distance changed the conversations for the better. When you work side by side, you talk about the work. When you’ve been away, you talk about the bigger picture — the moves people are making, the bets they’re placing. Same crew, but the conversations have leveled up along with everyone in them.
Short trip, but exactly what I needed. Manila always resets me. You leave home to grow — coming back is how you measure it.
Onward to March
February was a month of firsts — first MBA Olympics, first CNY in Singapore, first Lo Hei, first AMAX — balanced out by a slow day at the beach and anchored by something familiar: the people back home. That balance feels like the whole point of this chapter: stretch into the new, stay rooted in what got you here.
March, let’s see what you’ve got.
January: New Year, New Crazy Schedule (and a Better Version of Me in the Middle of It)
January didn’t ease me back in — it launched me.
The year started with the usual New Year optimism: fresh pages, big plans, that quiet promise that you’ll be more disciplined, more intentional, more together. And then reality arrived the moment school and work kicked off. My calendar filled up fast. The pace snapped back. And suddenly, my days had zero empty space.
If December was reflection and reset, January was momentum — the kind that forces you to get serious about how you manage your energy, not just your time.
L’Oréal internship starts: beginner mode, but in the best way
Starting my Regional Marketing internship at L’Oréal felt like stepping into a new world with its own language, rhythm, and standards. Beauty isn’t just marketing — it’s culture, identity, aspiration, and emotion, packaged into products that still have to perform commercially across markets.
The first few weeks were a mix of excitement and nerves (the good kind): onboarding calls, meeting new stakeholders across the region, learning how decisions get made, and realizing how nuanced “one campaign” becomes when you’re thinking across different consumer behaviors and contexts.
What surprised me most was how quickly it demanded a macro lens. It wasn’t enough to think, Is this creative strong? The bigger questions kept showing up:
What’s the business objective?
What’s the consumer tension?
What changes market to market?
How do you stay consistent while still being locally relevant?
It felt like the kind of environment that rewards people who can connect the dots — strategy, storytelling, and execution — and I could feel myself being stretched in real time. The internship wasn’t just a new line on my CV. It was a new operating system I had to learn quickly.
New classes: Valuation & M&A, Analytics for Managers
At the same time, classes started — and they were not the “ease into the semester” kind.
Valuation and M&A immediately put me back into student mode: technical concepts, frameworks, and the humbling feeling of learning something that doesn’t come naturally yet. Coming from a communications and growth background, finance can feel like a different language — more structured, more numbers-driven, and less forgiving if you try to wing it. But it’s also deeply empowering.
I can feel why this matters for the kind of roles I’m moving toward. When you understand value, you understand what businesses actually optimize for. It’s like being handed a new set of glasses — suddenly you start seeing strategy in a more commercial, decision-grade way.
Then there’s Analytics for Managers, which feels like being forced to clean up your thinking. It isn’t just about tools or dashboards. It’s about precision: what question are we really trying to answer, what data matters, what assumptions are we making, and what story does the analysis support?
It’s the kind of class that makes you sharper beyond school — because it trains you to be more deliberate about how you argue, prioritize, and recommend.
Together, these two classes made January feel like mental cross-training: one part commercial fundamentals, one part structured decision-making — both pushing me toward the “macro” version of myself I keep saying I want.
The hidden challenge: not doing everything, but doing the right things well
January also made something very clear: juggling internship and classes isn’t just about working harder. It’s about working smarter — and not burning out in the process.
There’s a specific kind of discipline you need when everything feels important. You can’t win by sheer effort alone. You win by making better choices: protecting deep work, staying organized, being honest about what you can’t do, and learning to trade perfection for progress where it matters.
It wasn’t always pretty. There were days when I felt like I was switching tabs in my brain every 30 minutes. There were moments when my to-do list felt like it was expanding faster than I could complete it. But there was also a strange satisfaction in it — the kind that comes from realizing you’re actually capable of more than your comfort zone.
Welcome back party: the reminder that this is a community, not just a program
In the middle of the chaos, the NUS MBA Welcome Back Party was the reset I didn’t know I needed.
It reminded me that this MBA isn’t just a schedule — it’s people. After everyone came back from break, it felt grounding to reconnect, swap holiday stories, and feel that shared “okay… we’re back” energy.
There’s comfort in being surrounded by people who are also juggling too much, also trying to reinvent themselves, also figuring it out as they go. The work didn’t disappear, but it felt lighter because the experience felt shared.
What January taught me
If I had to name January’s theme, it would be integration. Not just balancing internship and classes, but integrating the version of me that loves storytelling with the version of me that’s learning valuation, analytics, and more structured decision-making.
It’s messy sometimes. It’s uncomfortable often. But it also feels exactly right.
January didn’t give me softness — it gave me pace, pressure, and a clear message: this year will move fast, and I need to move with it — with intention.
And somehow, even with the crazy schedule, I’m excited.
December in Manila: Coffee Chats, Catch-Ups, and the Kind of Reflection You Don’t Schedule
December has always been my favorite season — especially when I get to spend it back home. I packed my bags, brought a few souvenirs, and headed to Changi for a full Christmas season in Manila.
I originally planned for it to be chill, easy, and manageable. But it quickly became busy — in a good way. My calendar shifted from classes to coffee chats, group work to catch-ups, and studies to reflections. I came home thinking I was taking a break. Instead, December became a bridge — between Singapore and Manila, between who I was before the MBA and who I’m becoming in the middle of it.
Reconnecting with home (and keeping the thread going)
I’ve been learning a lot in Singapore: new frameworks, new people, new ways of thinking. But Manila is still where many of my long-term questions live. If I decide to come back after the MBA, I don’t want it to feel like a cold restart. I want it to feel like continuity.
So I reached out to people I’d connected with online and through mutual circles while I was away. Not in a transactional way. More like: I’m still here, still learning, and I want to understand what “next” could look like back home — especially if I’m aiming for roles with more strategic, macro-level influence.
Coffee chat #1: What “strategic” looks like in real life
One of the highlights was a conversation with Gino Borromeo, head of strategic communications at Ayala — a company I’ve long admired for what it represents: institution-building, long-term thinking, and leadership at scale. I brought my classmate and Filipino batchmate, Therese, along for the chat. It felt like the kind of conversation worth sharing — and worth processing together.
Gino walked us through his career from agency to client-side, including time spent in Singapore working in advertising strategy before coming home. What I appreciated most was how grounded the conversation was. It wasn’t a glossy “career highlight reel.” It was honest insight about transitions, trade-offs, and the realities of navigating work inside a family conglomerate environment — the pace, the stakeholders, the responsibility, and the kind of judgment that gets built over years.
For me, the conversation anchored a question I’ve been sitting with more seriously:
How do you move into more strategic, macro-view roles — even within a communications capacity?
The answer wasn’t a simple “do X, then Y.” It was more about how you show up: learning to zoom out, understanding what really matters to decision-makers, reading context, and building credibility over time. “Strategic” isn’t just a title — it’s a posture. And in that kind of environment, communications isn’t just about messaging; it becomes a lever for alignment, trust, and influence.
I left that coffee chat feeling steadier. Not because everything is suddenly clear — but because I could see a path where storytelling and strategy aren’t separate lanes. They can be the same lane, if you build it that way.
Coffee chat #2: Consulting starts to feel tangible
Another conversation that stayed with me was with Marco Dela Rosa, senior partner and country head of Kearney Manila.
Consulting has always fascinated me — the pace, the problem-solving, the proximity to real decision-making. But it’s one thing to be curious from the outside and another to hear how the work (and the career) is actually built.
We talked about Kearney’s positioning and history — founded in 1926, globally respected, with strong practices across TMT, supply chain, procurement, retail, and FMCG. The Manila office is relatively young, but already doing meaningful work, particularly in Telco and Banking. What struck me was the idea that “lean” doesn’t mean small. It can mean sharp: a team that moves with focus, delivers work that’s grounded in execution, and builds trust by being practical — not theoretical.
That distinction mattered to me. I’m drawn to strategy, but I’m even more drawn to strategies that actually survive reality: organizational constraints, stakeholder complexity, and the messy parts of implementation.
By the end of that chat, consulting felt less like a distant “maybe” and more like a serious post-MBA path I want to explore properly — with intention, not just curiosity.
Switching gears: preparing for L’Oréal
In the middle of Manila energy, I also started preparing for L’Oréal.
It felt like a different kind of preparation — less “studying” and more mindset-setting. Beauty is a new industry for me, and regional work adds another layer: learning how to think across multiple markets with different consumer insights, cultural tensions, and business realities.
I felt excited… and a little nervous. The good kind of nervous. The kind that reminds you you’re still putting yourself in rooms where you have to learn fast and earn confidence through the work. There’s something humbling about being a beginner again — but it also feels right. This MBA chapter isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to stretch me.
Catch-ups that reminded me what “home” really is
Beyond the coffee chats and career planning, December was also about catching up with friends and family.
It had been more than five months since I left Manila to pursue an MBA in Singapore. And while Singapore is only about 2,400 kilometers away, distance still changes you — your pace, your routines, the way your days are structured. Coming home reminded me there are versions of me that only exist here: the friend who doesn’t need to explain context, the person who slips back into familiar jokes, the one who feels grounded without trying.
I met everyone: high school and college friends, old colleagues, running friends, and more. It was comforting in the simplest way — that feeling that you can be gone for months and still pick up where you left off. Same warmth. Same energy. Same sense that you belong.
And it made me grateful. Not just for the people, but for the reminder that growth doesn’t require abandoning your roots. Sometimes it looks like returning, reconnecting, and realizing you’re allowed to evolve in front of the people who knew you before the big plans.
2026: the anchors I’m carrying forward
As the year ended, I felt myself slipping into planning mode — but in a calmer way than usual. Not panic-planning. Not “new year, new me.” More like: What am I building? What am I learning? And what do I want this to add up to?
Here’s what I’m carrying into 2026:
1) Sydney Marathon
One of the best surprises of the break: I found out I got a slot into the Sydney Marathon 2026 – another world major marathon! It instantly gave 2026 a new anchor — exciting and slightly intimidating in the best way. After Chicago, I know what it takes to train through the unglamorous weeks: early mornings, long runs that test your patience, and the mental game of showing up even when motivation isn’t there. Sydney feels like the next chapter — not just another race, but another reminder that I can commit to something big and earn the finish line one day at a time.
2) Career goals
This is the year I want to move from exploration to sharper intention. December reminded me that opportunities don’t just appear — they compound through relationships, clarity, and sustained effort. Whether it’s consulting, a strategic role in tech, or something that blends storytelling with commercial impact, I want to be deliberate about the direction I’m building toward.
3) A new chapter
More than anything, I’m entering 2026 with a clearer sense that I’m allowed to evolve — and I don’t need to wait until graduation to act like the person I’m becoming. I want choices that reflect the life I’m trying to build: growth, community, meaningful work, and momentum that feels aligned.
Closing reflection
December was supposed to be a break. Instead, it became a bridge — between Singapore and Manila, between reflection and action, and between big plans and the people who keep me grounded.
And honestly, I’m grateful it turned out that way.
Closing the Semester Strong
November arrived like the semester’s closing stretch — where deadlines, decisions, and direction all showed up at once. Somewhere between finals and recruiting, the noise turned into clarity.
November closed my first MBA semester at a pace that didn’t ask for permission. It arrived full and loud, demanding your full attention.
Finals week turned campus into a quiet kind of intense. Study rooms filled earlier, and I slipped into a rhythm I recognized from GMAT days: flashcards, practice quizzes, late-night review sessions, and the discipline of showing up until the work sticks.
But what made November memorable wasn’t only the grind — it was the way everything started to connect. Outside class, I was in execution mode with the Marketing Club, running two back-to-back events that echoed the semester’s biggest question: what stays timeless, and what changes fast?
1. What stayed timeless (storytelling)
Ad Olympics was a casual sit-down session — an afternoon of watching ads from around the world and reacting in real time. It was laughter-first, but it didn’t stay “light” for long.
Somewhere between the jokes and the hot takes, we kept returning to the same truth: the ads that landed weren’t always the flashiest. They were the ones that understood people — building tension, delivering a payoff, and leaving you feeling something you didn’t expect.
It reminded me that storytelling isn’t a nice-to-have in marketing. Tools change. Platforms change. But the human brain still responds to meaning, emotion, and narrative — and great work still starts there.
2) What shifted (AI + technical fluency)
That same night, we hosted a panel on AI and the future of marketing with the Marketing Department, featuring leaders from NCS and Google, moderated by Dr. Samer El Hajjar.
The takeaway wasn’t “AI is coming.” The takeaway was more practical: marketers stay relevant by building fluency.
Not fluency for trend-chasing, but the kind that lets you integrate AI across the value chain — research, insight generation, creative development, testing, and measurement. The point isn’t to replace the craft. It’s to expand it.
What stayed with me was the balance: build the technical muscle, while protecting what remains timeless — taste, judgment, and the ability to tell a story that earns attention.
3) What expanded (PE + consulting exploration)
November also opened a door I didn’t expect to take seriously so soon: Private Equity.
I used to picture PE as an opaque world — backroom deals and capital movement — shaped more by movies than reality. But the more I listened, the more grounded the story became: value creation.
When businesses are improved and scaled responsibly — better operations, sharper execution, clearer strategy — the outcome can be bigger than a transaction. Fireside chats with SquareState Capital and SeaTown made PE feel less “mysterious” and more like a discipline tied to how companies actually work.
In parallel, I doubled down on consulting exploration. Through warm intros and coffee chats across Kearney, Bain, and BCG, I looked for clarity: what does the work demand, and what separates surface-level analysis from real problem solving?
A consistent picture emerged: structured thinking, strong communication, comfort with ambiguity — and the discipline to go beyond first answers. The best consultants weren’t the ones with the flashiest frameworks; they were the ones who could sharpen an issue tree, test a hypothesis, and land a point clearly enough that a room could move.
4) What landed (recruiting + L’Oréal)
Recruiting was the background hum underneath everything else: applications, interviews, assessment centres, recruiter conversations — plus a lot of learning in between.
By the end of the month, I secured a credit-bearing internship with L’Oréal as a Regional Marketing Intern for Semester 2.
I’m excited — not just because it’s a strong role, but because it feels like a step that can compound into 2026 if I execute well. I also leaned on the programmes and careers offices to pressure-test fit and negotiate practical details — a reminder that owning your path includes owning the questions you ask.
5) What grounded me (sailing + Singapore)
Outside the career sprint, I ended the semester by trying something new: sailing.
I joined a basic sailing class through the NUS Sailing Team at the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club. It was refreshing to be a beginner again.
It felt like a quiet lesson for the semester: you can’t brute-force everything. Sometimes the better move is to read the wind, adjust your sails, and stay steady. I also made time for museums, parks, and slow days with friends.
Closing
November was intense, fast, and demanding — but clarifying.
It reminded me what stays timeless (storytelling), what’s shifting fast (AI and technical fluency), and what I’m expanding into (consulting and value creation). And it gave me proof that I can carry a full season — and still keep moments that feel human.
I’m ending the semester tired, grateful, and genuinely excited for what this momentum could become in 2026.
October Momentum: Finding My Pace in the NUS MBA
What began as scattered exploration slowly formed into a sense of direction. October became the month where conversations, opportunities, and small commitments aligned into real momentum.
October marked a quiet but undeniable turning point in my MBA journey. If September felt like wandering through possibilities, October felt like the moment I finally started to move — intentionally, steadily, and with purpose. Classes deepened, club commitments accelerated, and career plotting shifted from hypothetical to actionable. It was the month momentum began to show up not in dramatic breakthroughs, but in the small, consistent steps that started shaping my path forward.
Below are the three layers of momentum that defined my October: career, community, and personal growth.
Career Momentum: When Exploration Turned Into Action
This month, I began approaching career planning with clearer intention. Through BizCareers, I joined two MBA-exclusive immersions with Amazon Japan and Restaurant Brands International (RBI) — both of which expanded my understanding of where my skills could fit post-MBA.
The Amazon session was particularly meaningful. I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of working in Japan, shaped by conversations with Japanese classmates and many personal trips to Tokyo. Meeting Harunobu Tokuda, an NUS MBA alumnus who entered Amazon’s Pathways Operations Leadership Development Program, made that possibility feel much closer. Hearing how the Pathways LDP prepares MBAs for fast-paced operations leadership roles revealed a career track I hadn’t previously considered seriously.
The session with RBI offered a different kind of insight. I came in with only a surface-level understanding of the QSR industry, but was surprised by how deeply operations, digital strategy, customer experience, and retail intersect in this space. Learning about RBI’s Leadership Development Program for MBA graduates, and hearing directly from senior leaders, made me appreciate the strategic depth of an industry I once overlooked.
My exploration also extended into tech and fintech. Through NUS TalentConnect, I joined the PayPal Recruitment Talk 2026 and met members of their team virtually, hearing their perspective on digital payments and financial inclusion — themes close to my heart from my time at Grab. Later, at Crypto Connect with Coinbase, I attended a fireside chat with Hassan Ahmed, Coinbase’s Country Director. His insights into regulation, tokenization, and AI’s growing role in the crypto ecosystem helped ground a sector I had previously seen mostly from the consumer side.
To support this growing momentum, I invested time in sharpening my own career readiness. I refined my resume through VMock, practiced structured thinking with CaseCoach, and pushed myself by joining the Tech Assessment Centre. Under coaches Zach Xiong (former Kearney, now YouTube) and Asad Hasanali (former McKinsey, now LXA Capital), I learned frameworks for tackling assessment-centre style problems — a rare opportunity to receive high-level feedback on problem-solving under pressure.
October was the month career exploration stopped being passive. I wasn’t just absorbing information anymore; I was preparing myself to compete.
Relationship Momentum: When Networking Became Community
Equally important to my growth this month were the people I met — and the deeper ways I began connecting with the NUS and Singapore ecosystems.
At the SG Startup Ecosystem Networking Night, I learned just how powerful NUS’s entrepreneurial engine is. With 11 NUS-supported unicorns emerging from initiatives like NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC), BLOCK71, and the Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP), I was reminded how much innovation sits right here on campus. As someone interested in entrepreneurship and value creation, the event reaffirmed that future founders and scale-stage leaders are not far away — they’re often just across the room.
Another highlight was “Scaling for Good (from Ideas to Impact)”, hosted by the Sustainability & Ethics Club. The founders who spoke are pioneering more inclusive and sustainable models — from PWD-friendly hiring practices to early circular-economy foundations. Their stories challenged me to think about how responsible design can be embedded into strategy from day one.
The Women in Tech Panel was a different kind of inspiration. Hearing leaders from companies like Amazon and Microsoft discuss allyship, representation, and leadership made the conversation feel grounding and real. Meeting Julie Bulaklak, a Filipina thriving at Microsoft as a startup lead, was deeply motivating — a reminder that people with backgrounds like mine can thrive and lead at the highest levels.
But the moments that stayed with me the most were the intimate ones.
A coffee chat with Ayo Canlas (UCLA-NUS EMBA, now CFO & VP of Strategy at SharkNinja) offered grounding advice on career pivots, ambition, and navigating identity as a Filipino leader abroad. Later, lunch with Prof. Joel Goh took me outside classroom formulas and into conversations about life, careers, and what “good work” might look like.
These encounters made October the month my network started to feel less like a group of acquaintances — and more like a community I’m belonging to.
Personal Momentum: The Discipline of Movement
On the personal front, October pushed me into a deeper state of self-awareness and discipline.
The defining milestone was completing the Chicago Marathon and earning my first World Marathon Major star. Training through classes, club responsibilities, and career prep tested my limits, but running remains one of the ways I understand myself most clearly. The race was tough, but crossing that finish line felt symbolic — a reminder that I can honour my commitments to myself, even amid the busiest season of my life.
Beyond the marathon, this month taught me to protect time for movement, to recalibrate my routines, and to sustain joy in small ways — including showing up at the NUS MBA Diwali and Halloween Party, a reminder that playfulness and celebrations are part of what make the intensity of the MBA survivable.
October helped me rediscover the version of myself that thrives when discipline, community, and ambition align.
Where This Momentum Is Taking Me
October wasn’t loud, but it was loud in its significance.
In my career, I moved from exploring to thriving.
In my relationships, I moved from meeting people to belonging.
In my personal life, I moved from surviving the semester to reclaiming my identity and discipline.
I’m no longer in wander-and-explore mode.
I’m in motion-building mode — and this month was the inflection point that made it possible.
Momentum didn’t arrive all at once.
It built quietly, steadily, and then unmistakably.
And now, I’m finally finding my pace.
Myth vs Reality: What My First Two Months at the NUS MBA Taught Me About Careers
I arrived a storyteller from tech and communications; I found a campus that let me explore like a builder. From a VC fireside to banking pathways, consulting drills, and company roadshows, the NUS MBA let me try real paths, not just imagine them.
Two months ago I started writing the chapter of my NUS MBA; since then, the program has been filling the pages faster than I can turn them. My career development journey keeps bringing me back to a lesson from our Managerial Operations class: if you want a break through, apply design thinking. You have to start wide, experiment freely, and resist the urge to shoot down ideas—then narrow the focus, optimize what works, and double down on what matters.
This lesson on design thinking was something that I applied on my first two months of the MBA. After doing marketing and communications for the last 8 years, I started venturing out of my comfort zone and into the great wild west of career opportunities. Thankfully – the NUS MBA has been a compass that allowed me to explore new frontiers like Venture Capital, Finance, Consulting and into the familiar with Consumer Packaged Goods and Tech.
Myth 1 (VC): Startups are just unicorns and vibes.
Reality: Investability is a discipline.
A fireside chat with Joe Zhang—who shared his pivot from the NUS MBA into venture capital and the milestones on his path to partnership—reframed Southeast Asia’s startup scene beyond headline unicorns. I followed the curiosity into Startup Wars, a TNB Aura–sponsored VC case competition. My team didn’t advance, but the reps were gold: dissecting unit economics, stress-testing models, and building a simple rubric for “investability” that filters pitch-deck poetry from compounding logic. Exploration works best when it’s structured.
Myth 2 (Finance): Finance is only for spreadsheet people.
Reality: It’s also relationships, judgment, and timing.
I signed up for the HSBC Career Pathways virtual talk and networking session after spotting it on the NUS TalentConnect portal—purely as a first-hand test. I’ve never envisioned myself in finance; I’ve built a career in storytelling, not “calculator work.” The session demystified the space. Through conversations with both new and experienced bankers, I got a look behind the scenes of Private Wealth—how trust and sequencing matter when advising clients—and a clearer view of how investment bankers function within the bank in Singapore. Beneath the models sit relationships, timing, and judgment. The fundamentals gap I need to close feels very bridgeable.
Myth 3 (Consulting): Consulting is all puzzles and trick questions.
Reality: It’s structured problem-solving—fast.
My curiosity about consulting started back at Grab, where many of my mentors—heads of operations, marketplace, strategy, and even our country manager—were ex-consultants from McKinsey and Accenture. At NUS, BizCareers ran two talks that put scaffolding around that interest: one with seasoned folks from BCG, McKinsey, and Mastercard about career paths, and another on how to approach casing. I’d done case studies when pivoting into tech after my agency stint, but formal casing was new. Learning to structure thoughts, break down problems, form hypotheses, and develop detailed answers felt like sharpening tools I already had—now it’s about reps and precision.
Myth 4 (Tech): Non-engineers can’t lead in tech.
Reality: Product sense + customer insight + shipped outcomes win.
A “career acceleration in tech” session with Vincent Xu (TalentGeist) mapped his pivot from private equity into strategy and product marketing at Google. That story quieted a fear I didn’t realize I was carrying: that leadership in tech requires code. What it actually requires is clarity—of problem, priorities, and outcomes—paired with the discipline to ship. As someone from a non-engineering background who’s been tech-adjacent at Grab, Vincent’s pivot widened my map instead of shrinking it.
Myth 5 (CPG): Brand marketing is just ads.
Reality: It’s a mini-GM role with P&L levers.
At the NUS × P&G roadshow, the team showcased opportunities across HR, Finance, and Brand Marketing. Having worked with P&G early in my agency-side years, it felt like peeking inside the house I used to get briefs from. Brand management appeals because it’s a “mini-GM” role—distribution, advertising, budgets, pricing—like running a small business. P&G’s legacy as the birthplace of modern brand management in the 1930s is disciplined creativity at scale. (The free shampoo and soaps didn’t hurt either.)
Myth 6 (Product): If you’re good at launching, you don’t need to build.
Reality: Building reshapes how you launch.
The INSEAD × Grab Product Games briefing for 2025 (which NUS won last year) flipped my old muscle memory. At Grab, in product marketing and communications, products usually landed on my lap—my job was to launch, grow, and scale them to millions of users in the Philippines. This time we had to think like PMs: find a new market opportunity and design a net-new vertical. Moving from amplification to creation fused both halves of my career—the storyteller who rallies momentum and the builder who makes something worth rallying around.
From Exploration to Evidence
Exploration only started to matter once it showed up in how I work. I began with the basics: I dusted off my CV from my b-school applications and ran it through VMock – an AI tool made available to us by the Bizcareers office. Three passes later, it finally matched the story I’m telling now. A coaching session with BizCareers—thank you, Linda—turned that momentum into a simple loop I can actually run: explore, learn, focus. Having a cadence changed everything.
With that rhythm in place, the map widened. I opened my search to Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and across ASEAN, saying yes to conversations and assessments as they came—from finance to tech, consulting to CPG. Each touchpoint forced clarity: what energized me, what I needed to learn next, and which direction deserved another step.
I kept the engine humming with a steady casing routine on CaseCoach and peer mocks, targeted applications through BizCareers, TalentConnect, and LinkedIn, and quick follow-ups that turn chats into next steps. One by one, these pieces are becoming more than activity—they’re evidence that the path I’m choosing is the one I can deliver on.
Looking Ahead
I came to NUS ready to test—and found a place that lets you do it with intention. Two months in, the design-thinking loop still holds: start wide, learn fast, narrow with care, and double down where skill, purpose, and joy overlap. What surprises me most is not how many doors opened, but how clearly the right ones now stand out.
The next chapter won’t be a straight line; it will be a series of deliberate bets—on people, on problems worth solving, and on work that compounds. If there’s one lesson I’m taking forward, it’s this: exploration isn’t the opposite of commitment. It’s how you earn it.
