Lee Jiawei

NTU EEE student Lee Jiawei recently completed his internship with Circles.Life. Circles.Life is a multinational mobile virtual network operator based in Singapore. The company was founded in 2016, initially operating exclusively in Singapore, leasing its network from M1. It was an illustrious experience that gave him an insight into working life after university.

Jiawei had his reasons for selecting Circles.Life to do his internship. He liked that Circles.Life is a young start-up but with a relatively structured organisation like an established company. The staffs are mostly around the early 30s so everyone is young and he found them easy to work with. He also like that they had team cohesion every month where every employee can go for a company-sponsored team-bonding activity and meal. The company also handsome perks for employees, for example, a $50 mobile bill waiver, free lunch every Wednesday, and a fully stocked, free flow pantry.

At Circles.Life, Jiawei was the was an Android Engineer Intern for the first 6 months and UI/UX Intern for the last 2 months. His tasks as an Android Engineer Intern involved fixing bugs, documenting of tasks and actions taken, automation of analytics, developing new features, and testing. As an UI/UX Intern, his tasks involved, designing assets for mobile app and websites, designing layouts for mobile apps and website, designing user flow for mobile apps and website and conducting user testing.

Internships are an important part of university life. Some things just cannot be learned in a classroom, that one simply has to learn on the job. Teamwork and project management are such examples. Learning how different departments come together to work on a task can be eye-opening. He also learned about the procedures involved in launching a product or feature out to customers.

Circles.Life also had a very diverse group of people from other countries like the Philippines, India, Columbia, Sri Lanka, and many others. The internships allowed Jiawei to learn how to communicate effectively with people from different backgrounds. When smaller companies expand to other countries, we may be expected to liaise with foreigners over the internet so knowing how to communicate with them will be very important. He also learned working from home may be the norm in the future due to COVID-19.

Some of Jiawei’s accomplishments in his internships involve developing a login feature for the Japanese app variant, developing an automation program that collects app analytics and processes the data every day and designing a complete user flow for a new feature.

With his impending graduation, Jiawei hopes to look for more than just salary and job growth in the role. He will also be looking at the company environment, demographics and other benefits so that his work life can be more enjoyable.