Saturday, September 6, 2008

Potential Research Project Topics

Can the young generations of Singaporeans face the upcoming challenges?


This is one of the topics that I will want to find out more for our research project.

As we know that, there are many challenges that Singapore faces in the 21st century. With the uprising challenges, Singapore is trying to push all its way out from the economic slowdown by making Singapore a financial hub, research hub, medical hub, as well as an entertainment hub, etc. With these rising prospects, there are many job opportunities available. However, there are many opportunities that people do not like to take up due to certain reasons. For an example, jobs that are unstable yet can be highly profiting, such as, sales personals and financial planner, or service line that requires youngster to work long hours.


The question is: Are our youngster willing to take up the challenge and give it a try? Or they just want a stable job to settle down?


The feeling is very ironic. You feel happy and proud to see that Singapore have been improving well and very fast, yet you will feel quite scary that, as a small country like Singapore, it have been improving too fast that most of the Singaporeans cannot take it. The pace has been getting faster and faster, no matter in education times or work times. Can really all Singaporeans take it now or even in the near future? Hence, we must find out, especially from the youngsters, whether they are ready to face the upcoming challenges. I had read a few articles on these types of topics and find out that nowadays, parents have been over concerned with their children’s school work which made these children feel that academic work is more than anything else. And, most parents had spoilt their children by trying to give them anything as long as the children say “I want.”


I am interested in finding out how do the youngsters come about to overcome the challenges if they are to face it? And, how they can maximize the opportunities given to them, if any? Should government and school try to encourage entrepreneurship? If so, how they can do it? The survey is important for us to understand how and what the youngsters, like us feel about this issue. I feel that different people with different background will give different opinions. It will be interesting to know such opinions. I hope by doing this research, we can also raise the awareness for the youngster to be more mentally and physically prepared.



3 comments:

GuangYi said...

Hi Shao Bin

I think you have a good research topic in the making here.

I know that you have taken a slight liking for my topic on whether orientation games in NUS are getting too physical. However, I realised that 2 of our module mates blogged about it as well, and I don't want to have a repetition of research topics within Miss Goh's class.

As for your topic, I believe we could furthur streamline it a little. This is because you research topic seems a tad bit too broad.

Maybe we could talk about a particular challenge that we might be facing as a young nation in the coming future.

For instance, is our country ready to take on another economic recession? We were last badly hit in 1997, and statistics have shown that we are already slowly slipping into some form of recession. So are Singaporeans equipped to fight another economic slump?

As for a more current topic, we could also talk about whether our small country is ready meet the challenge of hold a mega-event like Youth Olympics in 2010. Did we over-estimate ourselves? I think this could be another good challenge to explore.

Guang Yi

Shao Bin said...

Hey!

Thanks for your comment! We will work more on it tomorrow!

oxy said...

Hi ShaoBin
I like the topic you had proposed for the research as I think it is very close to our heart. For most people, the criteria of the job they usually look at are whether the job interests them; the kind of salary offers and the job’s stability.

In the recent years, our government has been strongly encouraging Singaporean to be an entrepreneur and offers a variety of incentives to help these people setting up their business. However, we all know that starting a business isn’t that easy as it involves many risks and courage. Perhaps we can look at some SMEs in Singapore as a case study as a reference in the research to see how these people face up the challenges along the way.

In addition, I agree with Guangyi that the topic may be a little too broad. Perhaps we can narrow the scope by stating specific types of challenges that Singaporeans face now or perhaps in the near future.