This is a compulsory core module for BBA students pursuing the Honours Year. I decided to take it in Y4S1, so that I can have a more chill semester in Y4S2. [P.S. Yes, you can take it in Y3S2 too, provided that you have met the requisites!! Please refer to the guidelines provided by CJD, I believe you have to clear at least 11 out of 13 core modules.]
To protect my identity (so my groupmates, company, prof won’t hunt me down LOOOOOL), I shall not disclose my allocated FSP4003 company and allocated supervisor, but I’ll give a brief walkthrough of my experience doing a 1-semester project, starting from the very beginning:
- Forming a team
Before you can even sign up for a project on the FSP portal, you need to form a team. During my batch, we were only allowed to form up to 4 people a team. However, from the latest email by CJD (Mr Chew), I heard that the minimum group members for FSP4003 has increased to 5… [I’m not sure which batch is affected by this announcement… but YALL ARE SO LUCKY :’) ]
If you don’t already know yet, FSP4003 is an 8MC module. I cannot fail to emphasise the importance of finding good groupmates!!! If you don’t want to get allocated to a (bad) team with random groupmates, just reach out to your friends and form a group [P.S. If you really don’t have any friends to group with, on the FSP portal, when you submit your project application, you can tick a box that says that “you need help finding a team” or smth like that. But… I highly discourage this because I’ve heard + I myself have experienced really bad members in a randomized team]
I managed to form a team of 3, and one of my friends invited another dude to join the team, so we managed to get a 4-person team. Anyway, the rest of us didn’t really know the 4th person too well, so we all went to grab a meal even before starting on the project LOL (#teambonding)
2. Signing up for a project on the FSP portal
Now that you have formed a team, appoint someone to be the temporary “leader”. This person will be in charge of applying for a FSP project on the FSP portal on behalf of the entire team. What the leader needs to do is to:
a) Collate everyone’s resumes
b) Do a short write-up that describes your team (ok la, everyone in the team can do this, but I remembered I ended up writing it on behalf of the team cuz nobody knows what we were supposed to write lmaooo)
c) Merge (a) and (b) together into ONE SINGLE PDF, and then upload it on the FSP portal when the leader apply for the projects (on behalf of the team).
And oh ya, do take note that the project application for Semester 1 begins as early as June/July! I’m not so sure about Semester 2, but I believe that CJD do send reminders about the opening of the FSP portal so just keep a look out in your Outlook inbox.
For further clarification:
a) Resume – Should contain YOUR LATEST CAP (out of 5). Everyone in the team have to disclose your CAP in your resume. It’s no surprise that the higher your CAP, the easier for you to source (and get accepted) a project. What I do is that when merging the resumes, I put the resumes in descending CAP order.
b) Write Up – Basically like a cover letter, placed on the very FIRST page (before all the resumes). What I wrote on behalf of my team was:
- Introduce ourselves and our various specializations (fluff abit, say why our different specialization will help in the projects = We are a versatile team, can provided all-rounded analysis yada yada)
- Talk about our various skill sets (yet another fluff, basically we joined case competitions together yada yada, got experience analyzing business case studies)
- Sign off with our names, emails and contact numbers (to say that the company can contact us to discuss our suitability for the project)
This write-up is a generic, standardized cover letter. We did not mention any company names, or express any interest in any available projects. The purpose of this write-up was just to introduce ourselves, and if any company is interested to take us onto the project, they can contact any of us for further discussions.
In case you are not aware, the FSP portal is open for many iterations. There are many, many rounds of applications, and CJD updates the portal with new company projects. Therefore, don’t be frustrated when you don’t get any projects in the first round of application. My team took 3 rounds before we got our project. As mentioned above, companies tend to look at the the CAP of all members when deciding to take up a group. In fact, I heard from my friends, that some groups even have to go for interviews, with the company, to see if they are suitable for the project.
Getting a company project for FSP4003 is more competitive than you think. Therefore, don’t be dejected if you fail your application for the first few rounds! JUST KEEP APPLYING when the portal opens 😀 And yes, when you apply again, you just need to submit the SAME merged documents above (c), that’s why its good to write a generic write-up (b), so you don’t need to tailor it to a specific company!
And oh ya, when you apply on the FSP portal, with the merged PDF file, you can choose your top 3 projects! More information of the projects can be seen on the FSP portal (but walao, its so hard to see the project description, and honestly, when my team and I read it, the project briefs are all so VAGUE LOL). My team and I ended up just going with our gut feel and choosing projects that we think we can all do haha. And after you choose your top 3 projects, since the leader is signing up on behalf of the team, please get your group members MATRIC NUMBER (Starts with A…….) so the system knows that you alr have a group!
To sum up, to sign up for a project, you need
a) a merged PDF containing all group members resumes (with CAP) + a short, generic write-up
b) Go the the FSP portal, uploading this merged PDF.
c) Choose your Top 3 projects (and rank them 1, 2, 3)
d) Write your groupmates matric numbers (to sign up as a team, if dh, tick the box that says you need help finding a team)
e) Submit and you wait to see if you get any of the project. (Basically, you will get a “congrats” email from CJD, and then u (or whoever applied on the team’s behalf) need to go back to the FSP portal to accept the project.
f) If you failed to get any (you will get an “unsuccessful application” email from CJD). Don’t FRET!! Repeat from a), when the FPS portal opens and apply for other projects.
P.S. I personally applied for all 1-semester projects, because I didn’t want to do FSP for 2 semesters (over december? no way).
3. After getting a project
Now that you and your team have gotten a project, congratz!! CJD will send the entire team an email, basically instructions on what you should do going forward. This is where my memory starts getting really hazy but I’m honestly too lazy to check my email, so I’ll just try my very best to recount what I remember:
a) Sign your LOU and COI forms. Basically, some Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure documents, to promise that you won’t reveal any confidential company information after the project has concluded (which is also why i can’t reveal much about my project :p ) Get everyone in the team to sign and acknowledge, then email everything to CJD.
b) Get a supervisor. (If you know any professor to supervise your team, this is when you start reaching out, get his/her approval, and let CJD know). But honestly not a very big deal if you don’t know any prof, as CJD will allocate one to you accordingly. BUT the bad thing about allocating is that my group only got our supervisor in Week 3….. so we only started our project in Week 4 :’D. (and oh thats not even the worst part of my project experience LOL read on to find out more).
c) After you get a supervisor, then you can arrange for a first-meeting with the company. This first meeting is to set expectations, for the company to provide a debrief on the project, and for you and your team to ask any questions. Like I mentioned earlier, as our team only got allocated a professor in Week 3, we couldn’t really reach out to the company (without the prof) so everything was delayed. I vividly remembered only meeting the company and the professor TOGETHER, for the first-meeting, in Week 4 :’D That was stressful.
But in the interval between getting a project, and having our first meeting with the company, here are some things that you and your team CAN do.
a) RESEARCH (secondary) for the project. Find out more about your company, what your project topic is about, questions to ask the company, ANYTHING. (P.s., my group really skipped this part, because there wasn’t a lot of information on the internet about our company and our topic were rather niched and specific to the company (so there was no information on the internet… cries)
b) Read all the documents that CJD send. I remember receiving some tips on the project, some documents on Issue Tree, Work Proposal Sample. It’s good if you and your team can attempt to fill up the Work Proposal Sample before your first meeting. Some components, such as the project budget, and timeline can be left blank, bc these are things that you need to discuss with your company. BTW, you don’t really need to submit the work proposal sample, but just to make sure everyone is on the same page, and also to avoid a potentially awkward first meeting, you can use this work proposal sample to kick start the discussion.
I remembered the entire team and I were so nervous during our first meeting with the company. It was on zoom, but we managed to get Prof to join the call too, so when all of us were very quiet (cuz got nothing to say mah), Prof ended up helping us to ask questions LOOOL. But I think most importantly, you and your team really need to set expectations for what your project is going to be about, timeline (if you intend to set up regular meetings with the company – ours is otot), budget (if any – we had no budget… ).
For us, we were really lucky that the company was a chill one, so it was quite “on-demand”, if we wanted to arrange a meeting with the in-charge, we just have to send him an email, so there wasn’t a fixed meeting timeline. We were also really lucky bc our supervisor was really supportive, and was very chill, in fact, haha we only consulted him once in the entire project ooof. I think this really depends on your own project and supervisor, the experience varies :D. But this goes to show how FSP4003 is really an independent project, you and your team really need to set expectations within the team so that nobody falls behind n you can smoothly complete the project (on time!!!)
4. Recess Week
This is really subjective, and depends on your team progress. But typically, Week 6/ Recess Week is when everyone starts focusing on the PRIMARY RESEARCH. If you are a BBA student, you will notice an influx of emails from CJD, who helps students send out FSP surveys.
I wish I could provide some advice on how this works, but due to the nature of our project, our target audience were not really students, but specific to the company employees. Therefore, we had to send our primary survey to the company in-charge, who helped us disseminate the survey to the company employees.
For my group, we realized that having a primary online survey was not very helpful and couldn’t really provide a lot of analysis to our project. Therefore, we arranged for Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with the company employees. (cuz why not). Also, this was when I CAUGHT COVID OPPS so we had to hold the FGDs online. (which in hindsight, was such a terrible idea, bc the zoom audio really sucked, and we couldn’t really hear what the participants were saying) Anyway, this was like our first time holding FGDs, and honestly, now that I reflect about it, we did a really good job preparing the questions, but we probably sucked at being the FGDs moderators (so there were a lot of awkward silence HAHAHAHAH). But oh well, I hope we do get extra points for all the effort.
5. Weeks leading up to Presentation Day
After all the primary research, we ceased meetings with the company, and instead, held lots and lots of internal meeting where the team allocate work to do, and meet up to discuss and track progress. What we did was that we choped a specific day of the week, and made sure that we met up every single week, so that we can go through all components together and discuss ideas. Thinking back now, I think we were all relatively productive??? We finished the entire report (without vetting) by Week 12, and already started on the slides on Week 13.
P.S. did you know that the final submission date stated by CJD is not really final? My group and I were so fixated on the 14th November dateline and literally chiong our project, only to realize that the final project submission (incld your ppt, report, reflection journal, peer eval) date was up to our professor. So make sure that you email your supervisor and find out when he/she wants your entire project to be done! I shall not forget getting ghosted by CJD when I tried to check with him lol.. sad..
P.S. did you also know that the recommended pages for the report is also up to your supervisor? it’s ok to not stick with the suggested 30 pages, in fact, my group really exceeded this page limit cuz we had so many things to write. I think we ended up with around 140+ pages (ok la, most of it was appendix, but I think our content took up around 32-34 pages!)
P.S. When you are done with the report, pls send an e-copy to CJD.
P.S. Its not really over til its over, don’t forget to write your reflection journal (5-10 pages) too. This reflection journey just details your fsp journey, and is a literal journal where you reflect what went right and what went wrong, and for the latter, you can throw in suggestions of how it could have been improved. For myself, I made sure that I tracked down the team progress, so that i won’t miss out the details, and made sure to update my journal every week. Honestly, I wrote like 8 pages of fluff, and I felt like I was in primary school again when i was writing my 笔记本 loool . But if yall need ideas on what to write i basically sectioned my journal into
a) Introduction
b) Key takeaways
c) Working as a team
d) Working with Company [name]
e) Conclusion
And throughout I just outlined all the struggles that I (+ my team) faced
P.S. This is a formal presentation (+ to a legit company), pls don’t use slidesgo like we typically do for other mods LOL. Please go look at CBS Case library on how to design ppt:
I think I was quite particular about the slides design for my group, and couldn’t stand the (oops) ugly slides, so I ended up redoing all the slides design by referring to above 😀
6. D-Day
Please try to arrange for a presentation at least 1-2 weeks in advance!! For my team, we had to find a day where our supervising prof and the company ppl can make it. D-Day was less(?) scary that I thought it will be, cuz initially, we were told that the company CEO, CFO, and all relevant employees will be joining the zoom call, so we were all petrified…… However, on D-Day, we were told during the zoom call that the CEO and CFO weren’t able to make it (phew — opps, I meant oh no!). And yes, my presentation was held online over zoom, because we weren’t able to head down to the physical office on the presentation day.
Our presentation lasted over ~50 mins ( and omg, I had like 15mins worth of non-stop script, istg my lungs almost failed on me halfway through) and we had like over ~50 pages of slides excluding appendix and references. Q&A was supposedly after the presentation, and I think my group was just lucky because on the company side, they were quite satisfied with our project ideas, and only had one question to raise, which was coincidentally my part… so i had to answer :D. Our supervising professor did not raise any questions during the Q&A too so yayy
Conclusion
It probably sounds like my FSP journey has been quite smooth sailing, but it wasn’t. Is this where I start… ranting??? I think that were many instances where my team and I had been very frustrated, because there were many changes in the project scope and direction. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, our team had to change our project scope in the middle of the semester, so we essentially had to chiong the entire fsp components in like 7 weeks… Even though this was quite inevitable, and was beyond our control, it still felt super confusing and frustrating (and annoying :’D) as the dateline draws near, and the company just added more and more criteria to the project loool. I think it was because of this that some of us ended up being so unmotivated near week 8/9, and we just wanna yeet this project away :’D.
But nevertheless, FSP was truly a memorable (!you can interpret it however u want it to) experience and 8MC is a true representation of its workload cuz my team and I really spent many hours a week meeting, discussing and writing. The happiest day of the semester was really when we concluded our fsp presentation, and my team just went out for dinner huzzah!!!
Whoever is reading this right now, all the best for your fsp journey jiayou manz!
Others
Lecturer: NIL, have your own NUS supervisor.
Readings: Depends on your own project topic, and how heavily you want to rely on secondary research and literature reviews.
Content: Depends on your own project scope and discussion with the company.
Recommend?: if you are reading this, you don’t have a choice (unless u wanna do dissertation) 🤡 hi biz honours kids. (edit: 20 dec, btw got an A+ for FSP HUAT AH)
voez
28 November 2022
NUS MODULE REVIEWS 