ICE.COLD.COFFEE

Camp Ideapolis. That's the name of the entrepreneur camp at NTU. It's a camp where we leart about writing an executive summary for a business plan and submitted it for competition.

It was a camp over 2 days, but it wasn't residential. Meaning it wasn't a overnight camp at NTU.

In other words, I had to spend more than an hour travelling from the east to the west of Singapore in the morning and another time back at night.

Luckily they had a bus to fetch us from Boon Lay MRT station to NTU. I had completely no idea how to get there.

My team was made up of Beverly, Kimberly and me.

When we first reached, we went to the lecture theatre and had some briefing and ice breakers. Nothing interesting worth blogging about.

Later, we had to choose a team name and slogan. In the end, we decided on Viola! and our slogan is "Carpe Diem!".

I don't know what this means but Kimberly says it's "Seize the day".

Interesting... None of us even knew how to pronounce it. Haha.

After lunch, we had a talk by Mr Seah Liang Chiang, some shareholder or CEO of DSC Holdings.

He was really impressive! He told us about all his previous failures and it was really amusing.

His grades were lousy in school and he failed many times before he came to where he is now.

Many of the successful people whose talks I have attended had lousy grades when they were in school.

Maybe I should start failing now, then I have a greater chance to be successful in future. Haha.

I think he earns more than a million in a year. Impressive! I want to do that too!

And after the tea break, we had to start planning for our business plan.

We contributed some ideas each, especially our project work ideas and in the end we modified a little of my project work to become our business plan.

It was to provide a exercise service to health and image conscious youths, including diet changes and grooming courses.

I didn't really support the idea partly because I was sick of project work and also because my group met with some problems so I didn't think the idea was a really good one.

But, Kimberly and Beverly both thought it was a good idea so we went ahead with it.

Each team had a mentor. Our mentor was Bryna.

At first we thought it was a guy but she turned out to be a girl.

In the beginning, I felt like she was left out in our discussions because we didn't really talk to her. I guess it's because we just met one another. Not too familiar yet.

But after a while, we really bonded.

She feels like a big sister to us. Really nice!

She helped us a lot and thankfully for her help, we were able to come up with a rough plan.

Without her help, I think we wouldn't even know where to start.

We planned what to do and split the work. There was really a lot to do and we had to hand up the completed plan by 2.30pm the next day and get a powerpoint presentation done by then.

We had dinner before we took the bus back to the MRT station. The meals were quite ok. I especially liked the tea break because the snacks were really appetising.

I guess for these camps and seminars, they really have to give you sufficient food. They would rather give you more than let you go hungry.

That's because you won't be able to listen on an empty stomach. It was the same with VJ's leadership seminar too.

After dinner, I realised that my family was visiting my Grandma at her house at Woodlands.

It was quite near to Boon Lay, at least nearer from Boon Lay to Tampines, so I decided to join them then my Dad would drive us home later.

Besides, I haven't seen my Grandma in a long while so it'll be nice to pay her a visit.

I could tell she was really glad to see me. We didn't do much, just sat around to watch television, but she enjoyed our company.

At around 10pm, we had to go back because it was late and I still had to do my part for the business plan.

After reaching home, I immediately went to bathe and started on the plan.

There was much research and typing to be done.

After almost 2 hours of typing and researching, I finally finished my part. At 2.30am in the morning.

I was terribly tired since I woke up at 6.30am that day.

I fell asleep almost immediately and wished my alarm clock wouldn't ring so soon.

This marks the end of the first day of Camp Ideapolis.

*Obviously, I didn't blog this on the day of the camp, but the date is set to sat.