Robert Chai

Someone who had taken the path less travelled. My ‘Generalist’ path, while partaking on various roles from differing industries and exploring a wide range of life experiences not taught in any educational institutions, has showed me a life of extremes highs as well as extreme lows. Often, these experiences may be comfortable to a rare few, it is often not shared to young individuals who need to know that these paths undertaken will still work out alright for them. Given my extensive 90-95% overseas travel needs for my work during this mentoring phase, I had managed to make time to mentor a young individual from Vietnam, and helped provided pointers and discussions to help aid her in seeking her own path forward.

I was brought on the team by the Project’s President at the last minute, just 2-months before the execution of this overseas community service project (OCSP), to help survey, plan and manage safety protocols that are essential for the 21-personnel team’s travels to Taiwan. Besides scrutinizing on potential escape routes in case of any potential typhoons or any other safety precautions, I had also outlined other necessary health-checks and scheduled preemptive injections visits to the medical clinic for the entire team, right before our flight. During the execution leg in rural South-Eden (南方伊甸園), I oversaw the setup of our sleeping tents, precautionary preparations for a countryside clean and safe workspace and toilet area, as well as ensured that the team execute their daily supporting responsibilities to ensure the mutual safety and wellbeing of all participating team members. The full team eventually returned to Singapore with zero fatalities and only minor cuts during their trip.

I led and managed the largest community service project (CSP) in Singapore Management University’s (SMU) decade-long history. In line to make 2010 the largest yet, to celebrate alongside with SMU’s 10th year anniversary, a strong committee of 24 was pooled together, as we further recruited 120 supporting facilitators and enrolled an amazing turnout of 550 freshmen to support our 10 days of community-based events. This included a 2D1N introductory camp (starringSMU Supernova), a 2-day fund-raising carwash (SMU Carwash), a 4-day community-giveback collaboration that spanned across 37 beneficiaries (SMU Givesback), a 1-day National-Day celebratory event to reunite couples to renew their love vows (Faithfully-Yours) that gained an overall external reach of 10,000 individuals, as well as a 1-day closing event (starringSMU StarLight) to commemorate and give thanks for everyone who had gave their time for this CSP. After a 2-month long recruitment, 8 months of planning and 1 fully packed

Voluntarily taking up a slightly less-commitment role during this major event, I was tasked to design the breakdown of the multi-tiered communications networks for the overall internal & external teams. These communications blueprints that are layered with a mixed array of walkie-talkies and modern gridphones, to ensure that the cross-networks do not overlap and cause network interferences, notably when so many active networks are in play during the event day. During the actual race, while working with my team of 20 committee members, I had to ensure that these multi-layer communication networks compromising of roughly 120 individual devices are fully functional, as well as having additional backups on standby, to be readily exchange at a moment’s notice.

I was given a key role to handle a major quarter of the running route segment along the Pasir Ris leg of the full marathon race. My primary scope was to survey, plan and manage the actual-day execution of the overnight marathon. The planning phase spanned across weeks of pre-route recces and devising additional route safety measures after multiple stakeholders meetings to help finetune the final execution procedures. On event day, I led the a team of 110 volunteers to handle the full marathon route management, which spanned across a 26-hour period for the entire team. I was glad to have zero casualties nor any reported injuries that came under my care.