For the Engineering Students, By the Engineering Students

Financial aid

Monday, September 29, 2008

Recently, the issue of the financial pressure on students kept coming back to me. It's more of a personal social experience than one that arose out of the nature of my new term of office. Suddenly, it occured to me that I had more friends facing financial pressure in university than in any point of my life. It made me come to revelation that certain things I take for granted were actually not an entitlement. I am new to this whole concept about tuition fees because I always took for granted that mine would be paid for anyway. It's a sheltered kid's mentality. Don't learn. Let me just try to work out the cost of a university education in the NUS Faculty of Engineering per annum.

Direct payment(sch fees): $ 6360
Miscellaneous fees: $216 (https://share.nus.edu.sg/registrar/info/ug/UGMMF.pdf)
Food(in school - lunch only): $2.20 x 13 x 5 x 2= $286 (assuming 13 weeks per sem 5 day week and chai peng everyday)
Transport: 52 x 10 = $520
Stationery + printing: $80

assuming no socialising.... the grand total comes up to...: around 7.5k per year
Which is quite a bit. Consider also this quite a mutant's kind of life with no socialising.
The fact is a few of us out there are actually working to pay that sum and, at the same time, studying hard to avoid getting killed by engineering modules (exaggeration but you get the point).

NUS has an extensive financial assistance framework (which I am still trying to learn more about). So if anyone out there is in need of such assistance please speak to the registrar office (http://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/sfau/staff.html). Or if anyone is stressed out, speak to a friend or if you don't mind you can email me. I don't think we should allow financial pressure to kill the joy out of any of our friend's undergraduate life. It shouldn't.

Anyway it's mid terms period now... good luck for your mid terms folks!

Weilei went off at 9:45 PM