This essay was originally written for NHS4001: Critical Reflection (Old) | (nus.edu.sg), a reflection class at the end of university.

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur and build a business. I look forward to starting a company at some point in the future, and the key to achieving that goal for me is bringing on board a competent team in the form of co-founders, employees, and investors. When evaluating a business idea or considering joining a startup, many of these potential partners choose to bet on an individual rather than any particular idea. This preference for a bet on the individual is because it is usually much easier to pivot an idea than to pivot an individual’s character and values, especially after a certain age, if things do not work out. Therefore, I have crafted this portfolio for that specific purpose: this portfolio is an honest account of my learnings in university that have shaped who I am as a professional and as a person. Every story has climaxes that change the course of action, and this portfolio narrates some of the climaxes of my university story that have changed me. The individual reflections (accessible via the menu on the right and can be read in any order) are indicative of the introspections I hope to do as an entrepreneur.

When I started university, I was a result-oriented person who focused primarily on the result when evaluating my progress. Questions such as “did I achieve X?” Or “was I able to do Y?” were all that mattered. However, by reflecting on some key moments in my university journey as part of USR4002A, I have realized that asking these questions does not reveal the complete picture for me to learn and improve. Through these reflections in my portfolio, I have become a much more process-aware and process-oriented person than I was before starting university.

Central to my goal of building a business is to build a product. In Rethinking Approaches to Building Valuable Products and Programmer As A Lawmaker, I examine and reflect on the process of building products based on my experiences so far. In Rethinking Approaches to Building Valuable Products, I narrate how a strategy to come up with startup ideas I learned in class was challenged when working on a hackathon project. When my team won a prize at a hackathon, I did not stop evaluating our progress at the outcome level by being content with winning a prize. I dug deeper into asking myself how we came up with the idea and built our winning product, especially because I had voted against the winning idea in our internal team meetings. Through introspection, I realized how I was fixated upon a problem-first approach, first introduced to me in (Graham, 2012), and that building products cannot be fixed to a particular approach. In Programmer As A Lawmaker,  I examine the process of building products in the industry. By comparing my experience building a self-driven side project with my experiences as an intern in large organizations such as PayPal and Garena, I reflect on how a programmer’s power in building products is more limited than I thought and is akin to a lawmaker’s power in a parliament. Therefore, I learned how the process of building products at large-scale tech organizations requires more interdisciplinary skills such as negotiation and presentation in addition to the traditional hard skills of programming.

A key to building a business is to learn constantly. In Re-examining My Learning Process, I reflect on why I found it easy to grasp concurrent programming concepts, which are typically known to be difficult. I discuss how my learner style played a role in helping me draw connections between the new concurrent programming concepts and the game theory concepts I had learned previously in a business class at USP. In this way, I became more aware of my learning cycle and, therefore, my learning process. In Taking Concurrent Programming Outside The Classroom, I work with a classmate and USP student Tan Wei Adam to reflect on how both of us had different key takeaways from an advanced class on Concurrent Programming despite having similar academic profiles. While both of us applied the niche concept of concurrent programming to areas outside of computer science, we looked at different aspects. In line with my goal to build a business, I take away a macro-level view of concurrent programming that can be used to optimize task completion in general. In line with Adam’s near-term goal to become a cyber security professional, his takeaway is more programming language-centric and how the representation of knowledge can make it easy or hard to understand something. Through this reflection, I learned the role of my overarching career goals in my learning process: my mind has a subtle focus on the larger, long-term goal I have.

Through these reflections, I have realized how focusing only on result-oriented questions does not reveal much about what I can do better next time. Instead, I have learned to dig deeper and ask the hard questions, regardless of the outcome: what was the process like? I may not have achieved a particular milestone, but was it because of a problem in my approach or any other external factor? In the future, I am inclined to set more process-oriented goals instead of result-oriented goals for my actions. I believe that this mindset is essential for a field such as entrepreneurship, where failures are statistically much more likely than in many other areas. Therefore, I need to realize how not every failure would indicate a problem in my approach, and not every success would be indicative of a positive approach. As an entrepreneur, I see myself doing similar introspections into processes at my company, regardless of whether the outcome of an event was favorable or not.

References

Graham, P. (2012, November). How to Get Startup Ideas. How to get startup ideas. Retrieved February 2, 2022, from http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html