About 85 per cent of Singapore University of Technology and Design’s (SUTD) pioneer batch of graduates were employed within six months of completing their course, according to the results of the first graduate employment survey released by the university on Monday (Mar 28).
Meanwhile, the top hiring sectors for SUTD graduates were from the research and development, and the infocomm services industries. The first batch of SUTD students – 298 in total – graduated in August 2015.
SUTD graduate Joshua Cheong, 24, was offered a job with Citibank as a management associate after he completed his Bachelor of Engineering (Information Systems Technology & Design) in 2015. He was offered the job after a 16-week internship at the bank.
He said the university played a big role in helping him find and achieve his career goals.
“We had a lot of time to explore what we wanted to specialise in – be it product design, computers or architecture, and we had the full breadth of studying a lot of different things,” said Mr Cheong.
According to the SUTD survey, about 86 per cent of graduates from the Information Systems Technology and Design course found employment within six months and earned a median gross salary of S$3,950, while about 92.5 per cent of graduates who took the Product Development course were employed within six months and received a median gross salary of S$3,600.
Among those who graduated with a Systems & Design major, 80.3 per cent secured employment within half a year, with a median gross pay of S$3,500.
Motivated by the positive results of the survey, SUTD’s Provost Professor Chong Tow Chong said the university is looking to exceed 400 students for its fifth cohort intake this year. Applications to the university will close on Apr 1.
“We’re happy now that our graduates are well-received by the industries with good employment and good salary, and I think they’re all happy with what they are doing,” he said.
Students who graduated from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University in 2015 had a gross monthly pay of S$3,468, compared to S$3,333 in 2014, according to their graduate survey results released in early March.
While the 85 per cent employment rate for SUTD graduates is below the 90 per cent for graduates from other universities, SUTD said this may be due to a number of graduates who have chosen to venture into entrepreneurial initiatives, gone on to masters programmes, or are taking a gap year.
The university added that it is confident that its curriculum helps its students meet the needs of the current and future economy – in particular, a manpower gap in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector.
“So it’s actually a multidisciplinary approach here where the students learn not just computer science, but also the artificial intelligence, the computer human interface, and also cyber security. And I think these are actually very important topics to prepare our students to fill the gaps and needs of the ICT sector moving forward,” said Prof Chong.
Of the 298 SUTD students who graduated in 2015, 86 per cent participated in the survey.
news source: channelnewsasia.com
