From civil engineering to management: SUSS graduate Tai Sihang took the classroom back to the site

Among the 2026 graduates of the Master of Science in Management (Chinese) at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) is Tai Sihang, who received both the Dr Lillyn Teh Salutatorian Award and the Cody Zhang Gold Award — the highest tier of the programme's award for outstanding graduates.

His first degree was in civil engineering. As construction and real estate moved into a new phase, he began to re-examine his own skill set — running projects, leading teams, making calls. Experience alone was no longer enough.

Why this programme

He chose the School of Business's Master of Science in Management, taught in Chinese, and — according to the programme — applicants do not need to submit an English language test score. For someone years into a career who does not want to spend another half year on exam prep, that matters.

One caveat: the English-test waiver has a condition. Per SUSS's published application checklist, applicants whose degree was not awarded by a Chinese-medium institution need HSK Level 5, 180 points or above. Language is not ignored — it is simply evidenced differently.

What changed in the classroom

STEM training is about subject knowledge and exams; here, class discussion, group assignments and teamwork became the main fare. In his telling, that training pushed him to analyse management theory alongside real conditions rather than judging purely from past experience.

The school's “Dream, Dare, Do” maps onto his path line by line: Dream — build capability with management knowledge; Dare — leave the familiar and study abroad; Do — bring it home and apply it in real work. Running through all of it is Learn — connecting theory to practice.

Back to the site

After graduating he joined his family's construction-equipment rental business. On a sub-project of a new expressway, he handled equipment scheduling and document coordination — putting the classroom method of prioritising, aligning information and getting a process moving into a real construction rhythm.

From engineering to management and back to the field — what this path shows is not how much a degree is worth, but that when someone studies with real problems in hand, the classroom becomes a tool.

Source note: based on SUSS's WeChat account feature “Graduate sharing”; programme and admission details should be confirmed on SUSS's official site. The image is an exterior of the SUSS campus (Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0), not the subject of the article. Original: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/yTB6CADeOO8ILJSijfe8Zw