Fun’s Survival Guide (NUS Business School) – Year 4 Part 1/2

W.e.f. 1 Jan 2021, I will no longer be entertaining any notes requests. I have moved on from university in all senses of the word (I don’t even use the same laptop anymore) – it’s already been over two years since I took my last examination. You can still read my reviews to find out more about the content taught in modules / the teaching style of the profs (please don’t ask me what was tested in Module XXX’s exam – whatever is not in the reviews, I’ve probably forgotten). I’m still happy to reply to comments on module experiences, internship experiences or what life is like after graduation (you can refer to my LinkedIn or read past posts of all the random things I’ve tried while I was in uni and after).

For juniors who have requested notes before 1 Jan 2021 with your NUS email addresses, I will honour those requests. All other comments will be ignored, and I will ignore and delete ad-hoc notes requests from people on any of my other social media platforms.

Appreciate your understanding, thanks!

I have admittedly been trying to get out of the house a lot more during the summer, to make up for a horribly busy past semester (where I was mostly shuttling between the triad of the MRB, my office in the CBD, and home…sitting for hours in front of the computer at a time).

For people who are considering part-time internships during the semester, I would advise you to do it during semesters where you are under-loading, unless you have an FSP with a very light workload, or your internship is less demanding on a day-to-day basis (I’m not sure about non-finance internships). I did it with a regular module workload (3 regular modules + FSP), and got quite burned out towards the end because of FSP.

If you are prepared to put in the extra work (2-3am nights were a norm for me last semester), I think managing schoolwork and the internship is perfectly doable. I created a routine for myself daily: weekday mornings (6.30-8.30am) were for studying, weekday nights (9pm – 1am) were for assignments and projects, 1am-2am was for any Protege Ventures-related work (and some other passion projects I had on the side), and the weekends were for readings and other class prep (and more studying). Sometimes the schedule changed depending on the work I had to complete at SAC Capital, or if I had to schedule meetings with founders and do some related work afterwards, but the routine largely held through the four months.

From my experience, you need to force yourself to be highly disciplined if you decide to do a part-time internship, because you not only have an obligation to be 100% focused on your tasks at work, but you have a responsibility to your project group mates (and yourself) at school (and not be a deadweight). Personally, I think if you can’t handle being a responsible and contributing member to your project groups with your additional responsibilities, don’t take on the job. Don’t be that member that everyone hates on for pulling everyone down…I’m sure people remember. And who knows if one day it may come back to bite you in the ass.

This semester, I took 4 modules (20MCs): FIN3117 Bank Management, FIN4112G Private Equity, MNO4316 Experiencing Work: Effects on Behaviour and Well Being and FSP4003 Field Service Project (worth 8MCs).

FIN3117 Bank Management [A]

A good module to take for people looking to get into middle-office roles at banks (Credit Analyst, Asset-Liability Management Analyst, Market Risk Analyst). I think 70% of the module was focused on market risk and credit risk, so if you’re into that, you will like this module.

Personally, my favourite topic in this module was product pricing because I wanted to know how banks ripped off customers. Basically, in product pricing, you learn about effective vs quoted loan rates, and how banks improve their IRR on loans by introducing different repayment schemes (flat/declining balance/annual or monthly rest). If I’m not wrong, FIN3103 in NUS also teaches this, but because I took my FIN3103 in Peking (in Chinese, no less), this was pretty new to me. At the end of the module, I concluded that banks thrive on the ignorance of layman consumers lol (so don’t be a fool — before you take an automotive loan or a mortgage loan, just ask your finance friends to help you crunch some numbers so you can decide on the loan that rips you off the least AHAHA).

This module is relatively test-heavy, so it was good for me last semester given all my external commitments (didn’t want to involve myself in too many group projects). The breakdown is as follows: Quiz 1 (20%), Quiz 2 (20%), Quiz 3 (25%), class part (15%) and term paper (20%). Quiz 1 takes place right after recess week, while Quiz 2 and 3 were on Week 11 and 12 respectively (back-to-back weekends). They were all arranged at 8am, so I thought that the bell curves would be less based on the actual difficulty of the papers, but more of who could manage to get their brains working that early in the morning (especially when you’ve got to deal with math problems) haha.

I did well for Quiz 1 (97.5%; percentile wasn’t given for this but I think I was about 1.5 s.d. above the mean), so it sort of served as my buffer. I participated in class every week as well (it wasn’t that difficult for me because I honestly didn’t understand a fair number of concepts at first glance and didn’t see the link between theory and real life scenarios so my questions revolved around those), so the 15% was also fairly easy to earn.

Did pretty badly for Quiz 2 (~50th percentile), which was purely essay-based, because I didn’t have time to study for it (was working on a deal that week in the office). It’s one of those tests that I knew I screwed up after leaving the exam hall. My performance for Quiz 3, which was fully calculations-based, wasn’t significantly better (75th percentile) because things were still busy at the office and Week 12 was pretty much my hell week with ten thousand other project deadlines, presentations, and submissions…I’m honestly quite thankful that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown then.

For the group project, we had to do a CAMELS analysis of ING Bank Australia and 2 peer banks of our choice. I picked HSBC Bank (Australia) as one of the peers, and my other groupmate sourced Arab Bank (Australia). Our group had about 5 people, which was fewer than the average of 6 people. Each of us took one aspect of CAMELS to focus on; and we all contributed for the remaining aspect, ‘S’ (Sensitivity), which was quite an easy aspect anyway. I took Asset Quality, which was more focused on analysing the bank’s non-performing loans (NPLs), gross loans, loan loss reserves, etc.

I remember that I was at work on the day of submission for the term paper, and spent about 30 minutes of my lunch hour just going through the whole final draft to check if everything looked satisfactory, before giving my teammate my approval so it could be submitted on IVLE. I wasn’t as thorough as I was in previous semesters (because it’s a 20-page report excluding all our supporting tables and charts), but I think it was a fairly good effort. Considering that I didn’t know any of my groupmates prior to this module, and 3 of them were Year 3s and the other a fellow Year 4 I’ve never met, I think I was quite fortunate this semester in the groupmate department.

In the end, did pretty well for this module despite my lacking Quiz 2 and 3 scores, so perhaps our term paper was much better done than I expected after all.

FIN4112G Private Equity [A+]

This module was a natural choice for me, after taking an LOA at a private equity firm and given my current involvement in Protege Ventures. (PE and VC are pretty much related, especially in the context of SEA, where the lines are less distinct.)

If you’ve taken FIN4122 Entrepreneurial Finance by Prof Daniel Ong, you’ll find this module relatively easy, and it’s really more of an extension of FIN4122 than anything else (you can see my review on FIN4122 here: https://thechroniclesofun.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/funs-survival-guide-nus-business-school-year-3). To be honest, I was a little disappointed at the lack of exposure to LBOs, which was initially my main motivation for taking this module. While there was an LBO take-home exercise (10%) that we had to complete over recess week, it seemed like more like an accounting case (you need to have a good grasp of calculating depreciation, capex, etc.) as she already gave us a pre-made LBO template (and nowhere near the types of LBO templates I’ve seen in my internships). So sad to say I still don’t know how to build an LBO model from scratch 😦

The breakdown for this module is as follows: Class part (20%), Case Study (20% Group, 10% Individual Submission), LBO exercise (10%), and Group Project (30% Group, 10% Individual Presentation Skills).

My class part warrior mode was on for this module, and I participated about 2-4 times each week. I think it was likely because I was more familiar with the concepts taught in this module, and because I thought competition was going to be tough (my class had a couple of people who are generally known around Biz for being bell curve wreckers). Just make sure the prof remembers your face at the end of the module. At some point in the semester, she’ll also start picking less responsive students to answer some questions, so if you are not called, I’d say you’re pretty safely above average in this component.

For the first case, you get to choose your group and the case you want to work on. Typically, I’d suggest you choose the first few cases if you’re less savvy with numbers. This is because the first few weeks tend to focus more heavily on strategy, due diligence, and deal types (not so much on the actual mechanics of deal structuring). The last 3 cases are relatively heavy on numbers and require some level of familiarity with Bloomberg and financial modelling. My group chose the second-last case on Shanda Games, which was an IPO case. It was quite manageable, and coincidentally quite relevant to my part-time internship (which was Equity Capital Markets-related). However, the case is extremely old, and I had a bit of help from my teammate on extracting historical figures from the Bloomberg terminal (I think the figures I had to look for were 2003/2004 figures….and some of the relevant competitors then don’t even exist today anymore). Also made a horrible error for one of my valuation estimates based on EV/EBITDA. I remember thinking why our valuation range was somewhat lower than the one displayed in the IPO prospectus for the company (handled by Goldman Sachs). We only realised our mistake when the prof started questioning us in the Q&A, which was hella embarrassing (but hey, at least I know I wouldn’t make the same mistake again lol once bitten twice shy). Basically, we forgot to convert EV to MV before calculating the correct IPO price range. Because of this, we probably got some points deducted. But I think the other parts were fine and we tackled the Q&A adequately (save for the EV/MV error for the EV/EBITDA comp), so I think our group was average for this 20% component.

The individual submission for the Shanda case was quite easy; we were asked to consider 3 other alternative exit options should the IPO fail at the last minute. Answers are abundant on the Internet, but to truly differentiate yourself from others, I think it’s important to consider the capital structure of the company and the market conditions (interest rates, for example) at that point in time (2004) in shortlisting the most attractive options and substantiating your rationale for choosing them. Takes a bit of digging online, but it’s not impossible to find articles or books written about the macroeconomic conditions back then. Additionally, being specific helps add depth to your answer. For example, if you say you want to pursue a trade sale, who are some viable candidates? Why would they be interested in a trade sale?

The LBO exercise was quite manageable as well. I think the only part that was slightly tricky was determining the gross profit margin, but once you’re past that, everything else was fairly straightforward. It also helps if you have other friends’ answers to check against to figure out if you may have overlooked any bits of information, or if you entered the correct conditions/assumptions into your Solver in deriving the most optimal deal structure that maximises IRR.

The final group project was exactly the same as it has been for goodness knows how many years. For this project, you can’t choose your groupmates. Generally, most groups had 6 people, but mine had 5. We were given 3 SGX-listed companies: Old Chang Kee, YuuZoo, and Overseas Family School. For the final report and presentation, we had to choose between: (i) Rejecting all deals, and explaining the rationale for rejecting all of them; and (ii) Pick one company that you’d invest in and come up with a full investment thesis.

Seniors in the past mostly picked (ii), and picked OCK as their chosen company. Honestly, quick and basic research (not even in-depth analysis) would obviously lead you to reject YuuZoo and OFS…no investment company/fund with competent due diligence teams would ever pick either of those two companies to invest in. For our class, there were two groups that chose (i), while the rest of us went with (ii) + OCK. Many of the seniors also picked LBO as their deal structure, and chose to buy out at least 80 – 100% of the company, as did most (if not all) of the groups within our class which picked Option (ii). Our group went a slightly different route in picking our deal structure. We went for a PIPE deal, with the backup option being slightly more doable and conventional (a growth equity deal). The prof seemed quite okay with our analysis and our proposed deal structure, so I think our group did reasonably well for this component.

All in all, I think my group project and my class participation were the main factors that compensated for my mistakes in the case project and helped me obtain my first A+ in business school 🙂

MNO4316 Experiencing Work: Effects on Behaviour and Well Being [B+]

This module was the fluffiest module I’ve taken in a long time (since MNO2007). Then again, what does one expect from an MNO module? Ironically, it was about establishing a good work-life balance, which is definitely unheard of in the industry I was working in (and the industry I aspire to enter upon graduation). I think most of the people in that class were management and marketing majors…I only saw about 2-3 finance majors in there.

Surprisingly, I think I put in more effort into this module that either of my finance modules…and this is mostly because readings were a pain to go through. I absolutely hated reading those assigned readings from psychology journals…perhaps because they were so long-winded and kept repeating similar ideas throughout the entire paper. I felt like some of these academic scholars took 2 long paragraphs to explain what could be summarised in 1-2 sentences. The prof would pick 1-2 groups at random every week to answer questions from the readings, and would record the groups that were unable to answer him satisfactorily (maybe penalise their class part? idk). So it was generally advisable to just do the readings. Our group just split the weekly readings more or less equally among the 3 of us, and upload our summaries online prior to class every week on Google Docs.

Anyway, the breakdown of the module is as follows: class part (15%), group project report (25%), presentation of group report (20%), and individual paper (40%).

Didn’t really bother to class part for this module until the end; I think I probably spoke about 4-5 times the whole semester for this module and ultimately got a pretty average score (or maybe even slightly below average score) for this component. I found it extremely challenging to out-fluff MNO students, and given that I haven’t taken a single MNO mod beyond those that were required (core modules) prior to this MNO4k module, I definitely suffered, especially in not knowing what fancy theory illustrated some basic intuitive concepts.

For the group project, we had to get into teams of 3-5 students to come up with a work-life programme for a company of our choice. We were one of the two teams of 3 in the entire class (idk why all my teams this semester were below the average group size…must have been a trial of sorts to see how much pressure I could take before I snapped) and things weren’t all smooth-sailing as I was constantly butting heads with one other group member. I think both of us have fairly fiery personalities and occasionally stubborn natures, so thankfully there was someone in the group to mediate between us and alleviate tensions.

In the end, we set aside our differences because we both wanted to do well for the project. We picked the Singapore General Hospital as our chosen organisation, and our presentation went quite smoothly (despite the fact that we ran a little over the allotted time). I think it was the most flashy presentation I’ve done in a while, with props and more basic slides (quite the change from the loaded case comp-style slides you see in finance modules). The prof seemed to like the effort that went into the props though (thanks to one of my amazing groupmates), so at least that part paid off. The report is essentially a formally-written paper of our presentation (with changes based on the class’s and the prof’s post-presentation comments).

Considering that the individual paper constituted 40% of the grade, I honestly expected it to be a little harder but it took about 25% of the time I spent on the project and presentation. We had to talk about our career ambitions and how we planned on adding work-life balance into the mix (for me, hoping to get into IB…what’s work-life balance again?). The prof limited the whole assignment to 4 pages (font size 12, 1″ margins) so it took me only about 3 hours to write it, and then about 2 hours to shorten it (over a few days).

Generally not a very mentally-intensive module, but the readings are a struggle to get through. Just a bit of a refresher in case you don’t know this already: Bells and whistles are a necessity for all MNO mods, and MNO4k modules are no exception.

FSP4003 Field Service Project [A]

FSP… there isn’t really much to say about it, since everyone’s experience varies, subject to the company you’re doing the project with and your supervising professor. I did the SPRING Singapore/Enterprise Singapore project focusing on the Study of Innovation and Productivity in Singapore SMEs. If you want more insight into my experience in that project (like you’re considering applying for this project on the portal), just drop me a message on this post with your email and I’d be happy to talk to you about it. If you want to take a look at my learning journal for the module (20%), you may also refer to it here: https://thechroniclesofun.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/fsp4003-learning-journal/