It has been a decade since Yue Lin (BAcc 2010) graduated, and while she has been through various exciting life experiences since, she still holds fond memories of her undergraduate days in SMU. One of the most cherished memories at SMU would be the friendships forged between classmates and professors. They have indirectly shaped her life and career choices.
Yue Lin revealed that SMU left an indelible mark on her, transforming her to be more vocal and extroverted. An introvert by nature, she attributes SMU’s pedagogy with plenty of in-class participation, interactions, and presentations that helped build her confidence. She adds that these skills have helped her tremendously in her professional life.
While she enjoyed the Law modules most, it was the Accounting Professors, Prof Sum Yee Loong, and Mrs Teh Choon Hwee, who had left the deepest impact on her. Yue Lin attributes them and their influence that led her to pursue a professional career in corporate tax. She is also appreciative of the dedication of Professor Pearl Tan, who makes it a point to stay in touch with current and former students. Yue Lin recalls Prof Tan’s dedication and patience in teaching a tough module like Advanced Financial Accounting.
Yue Lin shared that while she has since had the benefit of experiencing a very different university style of education while pursuing her Masters in Germany, it was the SMU pedagogy that provided her with a solid head-start during the formative years of her undergraduate education.
Yue Lin arrived in Germany in 2015 with an initial intent to finish her Masters before reassessing her next steps. As chance would have it, she received a job offer from a highly-specialised German electronics and communications engineering group and she has since moved and stayed in the city of Munich. Some of her main highlights of living in Germany are its beautiful natural landscape – the Rhine, vineyards, mountains, lakes, and forests, and the experience of the four seasons. An additional bonus, she adds, was that she met her boyfriend in Munich. Yue Lin did balance this perspective with some apparent ‘down’ sides to living in Germany, including its bureaucracy and paperwork, and missing family and friends.
Her journey to connect the SMU Community was a natural progression as she was an active postgraduate student in Germany where she took on the role of Treasurer for the Singapore Students’ Association of Germany. While Germany is not a typical overseas destination for Singaporeans to live and work, she was surprised to have found a sizeable number of SMU alumni there. On knowing this, Yue Lin contacted OAR and volunteered to help connect the alumni in Germany.
Her motivation? Yue Lin believes that the alumni can leverage their experiences to strengthen the community ties there. She is also thinking of establishing a professional support group and an outreach programme in time to come. The COVID-19 situation has further deepened her desire to connect, help, and support SMU alumni.
The first milestone in connecting with SMU alumni was brought into fruition with the help of a fellow-alumna, Carolina Yeo, and SMU OAR. Together, they organised a virtual event and managed to e-meet a handful of SMU alumni in Europe for the first time. She hopes to continue this momentum with another casual meet-up session soon.
To conclude, Yue Lin highly encourages SMU alumni and students to step out of one's comfort zone and allow oneself to be immersed in a new culture or society. She has stepped out and learnt to become more broad-minded, adopting various viewpoints when tackling complex issues.
