Back to School After 3 Years: Lulu’s Path to an MSBA in Singapore

Updated 2026/10/16

Today’s guest is Lulu, a National Cheng Kung University graduate who, after three years of work, went to Singapore Management University (SMU) for the Master of IT in Business (Analytics Track). She shares her MSBA journey.

In this article

📂 Why study abroad: after three years in the workforce, she wanted a wider career view and new knowledge, and a degree that would bring change
📂 Why Singapore: education, industry, location, culture, language
📂 Choosing a school: admitted to NUS and SMU; teaching, job prospects, internship structure, campus location
📂 Applying on her own: she first considered an agency but felt it couldn’t meet her needs, so she handled her applications herself
📂 Writing application essays while working: time pressure was the main challenge; her advice is to start early and stay relaxed
📂 Interview prep: beyond English, she focused on explaining her goals, skills and interests, and showing her passion for data analytics
📂 Future plans: talk to alumni early to learn about their experience at the school and plan your career better

Why study abroad

After three years of work, why did you decide to study abroad? What did you hope this master’s would give you or change for you?

In my senior year I had already gone back and forth on whether to do grad school first or start working. I realized there was too much I didn’t know about the working world, so I decided to work first, especially on the front line, to see how operations really run. At the time I gave myself three years before deciding again.

As my MA (management associate) training period was coming to an end, I revisited my career plan. Living and working abroad seemed like a good option, and I also wanted to take everything I’d seen at work over those two years, organize it, and fill my gaps (statistics, data analysis) in a more systematic way. So I chose to study abroad.

Why Singapore?

When I was choosing a country, these five points mattered most:

1. Education: I looked at both the overall education system and the business and data analytics fields specifically.
2. Industry: job opportunities there after a BA degree, and whether the industries the country focuses on were ones I liked.
3. Location: I wanted to stay fairly close to Taiwan so I could go home whenever I needed to.
4. Culture: I hoped the local culture (or at least the workplace culture) would be inclusive and respectful of all cultures and ethnic groups.
5. Language: ideally an English-speaking country, or one where English is the main language of instruction in higher education.

After narrowing things down, my main options were the US, the UK, Singapore and the Netherlands. I didn’t want to go to a big country, so I applied to grad schools in Singapore and the Netherlands. Singapore’s application cycle finished first and I got my results earlier, so I never applied to the Dutch schools.

You were admitted to both NUS MSBA (ranked 11th globally) and SMU MITB (ranked 30th globally). Why did you choose SMU MITB, and what factors did you weigh?

NUS was actually my dream school, and turning down the offer really hurt, haha. But when you have offers from more than one school, you have to go back to why you wanted to study abroad in the first place and decide based on that. I looked at it from two main angles: teaching (what I could learn at the school) and job prospects (whether I’d have a better chance of working there in the end).

For teaching, I looked at three things: how classes run (large or small), the curriculum, and students’ work experience and nationality mix.

NUS mostly teaches in large classes and puts more weight on lectures and coding. You choose your specialization through your course selection after you arrive, so you don’t have to decide before enrolling, which gives you a lot of flexibility. Students have less work experience, and about 35% are local.

SMU mostly teaches in small classes and emphasizes class discussion and group projects. You choose your track when you apply, but you can still take credits across tracks and programs. Students have about 4 years of work experience on average, and about 50% are local.

For job prospects, I looked at the internship structure, job search support, career resources and the campus location.

At NUS, the internship comes in the last three months of the program, so the sequence is: finish all your courses, do the internship, then graduate and job hunt or start work. The school offers help such as resume reviews, and career resources are plentiful thanks to its many corporate partners and large alumni network.

At SMU, the internship falls around the second half of the program, usually with interning during the day and classes at night. Job search support includes resume reviews, mock interviews and various workshops, among other things. Career resources are also plentiful, with many corporate partners and alumni. Its location is better than NUS’s: it’s downtown, which makes internships and getting around more convenient.

Once I compared them, it was clear what I needed. SMU offered more of what I wanted, so I chose SMU!

(Source: QS Business Master’s Rankings 2023: Business Analytics)

The application

You first looked into agencies. Why did you end up preparing your applications yourself?

At first I kept hearing that as long as you get good scores (GRE, GMAT, IELTS, TOEFL and so on), an agency can handle everything else. Half convinced, I researched online and booked one-on-one consultations with three agencies. I felt the services they offered didn’t fully match my needs, so I decided to do it myself.

There were three main reasons. Agencies mostly handle countries like the US, the UK and Australia, while Singapore and the Netherlands, where I wanted to apply, are less common destinations. I did get some useful information from the consultants in the free first sessions, but what an agency could help with didn’t quite match what I’d imagined. And I’m a cautious person who worries about everything, so after thinking it over, I felt more at ease applying on my own.

Having gone through the whole process, I’d recommend doing it yourself if you have the time, especially if your programs include interviews. Writing your materials makes you rethink and dig into why you want to study abroad. And because you’ve put in so much work, getting the offer feels even better and means more.

What was the biggest challenge in preparing your application essays, and how did you deal with it?

This goes back to the free agency consultation, where I realized I could actually aim for AY 2023 (the 2023 academic year). So I reworked my whole preparation plan, but I have to say the final prep and sprint were tough. Almost all my materials (SOP, CV, recommendation letters and so on) and my scores (GRE, IELTS) were done in the 45 days before I submitted. If you have time, I’d still suggest finding out early what your target schools require and what you can prepare in advance.

About two weeks before the deadline, I could feel my body was close to its limit under that much pressure. I told myself to just get through those last few days and stop pushing so hard. Worst case, it would be another 180 or 365 days; my health mattered most. Relaxing my mindset a little and letting go of some excessive worry made things easier, so I still got through the online interviews and was admitted in the end.

How did you prepare for interviews?

Besides working on my English, the part I prepared hardest and showed best was understanding what I really wanted, and making the interviewer feel how committed I was to my goals and be convinced by them. Every other question you prepare comes back to this core idea: who you are, your past experience, why you want to come, where you want to go, and so on.

If you’d had more time to prepare, what would you have done differently?

I’d have contacted current students and graduates of those programs earlier to check whether my picture of them was accurate. That would have helped me plan my career path more fully. I could have asked them what support the school offers, or learned that other graduates were already in related jobs, so I’d have known sooner what to work toward and spent less time unsure after exploring on my own. The other thing is building a regular exercise habit, so I’d be healthier, keep a steadier routine and have more energy for the tests and the whole application.

Career planning

What skills did you build as an MA at a large company? Why did you become interested in data analytics?

An MA in retail may not be what people picture. You spend a lot more time on the front line doing hands-on execution (in other words, very miscellaneous work). Most of the time you do the same things as a regular specialist; you just get the chance to take on more projects or management tasks. Overall, I’d say I learned skills in three areas: Business Development + Project Management + Customer Relationship Management. I was also more interested in data and industry research, and my manager let me spend more time digging into that.

It wasn’t so much that I became interested in data analytics after starting work. At work I found I was good with data, and I realized I enjoy finding insights in the numbers and then checking them against real business results. That confirmed I still wanted to do data analytics work!

After getting your master’s offer and before leaving, what internship project did you do?

Honestly, it was less an internship project and more a consultant-style role helping with planning and execution. It only lasted a little over three months and I worked three to four days a week, so I think of it as an internship project, haha.

During the gap I worked at a former client’s company on two main projects: evaluating locations for the brand’s physical retail counters, and planning and rolling out a new ERP system. The first was related to my previous job; the second was the kind of system implementation planning I had always wanted to try.

Why did you double major in history and statistics in college?

For me, history was an interest, and I chose statistics mostly out of curiosity about the management school. It turned out to be a science major dressed up as a management one. At one point I was exhausted and had no idea what I’d do with all that statistical theory, but I’ve always liked math, so I kept taking the courses. Overall the coursework was manageable and never too heavy. It was like in high school, when you got tired of math and science and switched to Chinese or history and geography for a while. With some balance and planning it works, and before I knew it I had graduated with a double major.

Other questions

Is it hard to get into business analytics without a programming background? (The field has been very hot in recent years.)

Business Analytics = Computing Skill + Math/Statistics + Business Knowledge

I think you need a good grasp of at least two of these three. If the third is a bit weaker, that’s not a big problem; just catch up as soon as you can. But if you have zero experience in it, it may be harder.

For computing skills, at least take some online courses in advance, and if you want to go further, try using code for research or a small project. What matters is that the interviewer sees you know your strengths and weaknesses, that you’re willing to improve and have already started, and that you plan to keep improving. That’s enough.

One thing I can share: in my interview, the interviewer asked about my data analytics experience, but my college group projects were a long time ago. So I talked about how I’d built analytical logic into projects at work (forming hypotheses, checking them with data, the final results), and the interviewer accepted that.

Any advice or encouragement for younger students who want to go into data analytics or business?

In my first year as a statistics major, the line I heard most was “Data scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century.”

Back then it seemed like everyone in the world wanted to become a data scientist or an engineer. Years later, everyone needs to be able to analyze data.

Both BA and DS are popular fields now. Rather than just chasing them, I think it’s more important to understand what you want to achieve by learning these things. That’s what keeps you steady on this path without losing yourself.

If you really love it, go for it without hesitating. How will you know what you’ll see if you never start? XD

To compare more MSBA alumni’s backgrounds and application approaches, see What is an MSBA? A business analytics application guide, which brings together the experiences of 9 alumni.