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Date: 20 December 2022, Tuesday | Time: 7.30pm to 9:00pm

Registration Deadline: 20 December 2022, Tuesday | Time: 7:00pm (GMT+8)

The education landscape has seen a paradigm shift in recent years, with the pivot to hybrid learning, emphasis on holistic development, and emergence of massive open online courses. With education as a key enabler of social mobility, Singapore has consistently sought to improve the distribution of opportunities available to students of different schools and promote lifelong learning. Interested to find out more about the occupations related to the education industry? Join us online on 20 December for Discover+: Education. Sign up here to hear from experienced professionals working in the education sector!

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This is an invitation for the Y4 RGS students and teachers to join  the upcoming Home Team Discovery Series (in Dec 2022) – ref attached eDM. There will be 9 sessions of physical visits and webinars , as part of this series, to introduce to students / teachers on the work that the respective Home Team agencies do.

These 9 sessions will be hosted by the individual career tracks:

Singapore Police Force (Uniformed Career , Civilian Careers: Commercial Affairs & Intelligence)

Singapore Civil Defence Force (Uniformed Career)

Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (Uniformed Career)

Singapore Prison Service (Uniformed Career)

Central Narcotics Bureau (Uniformed Career)

Ministry HQ (Civilian Generalist)

Internal Security Department (Civilian Internal Security)

HTX (Civilian Science & Tech)

Home Team Behavioural Sciences Centre (Civilian Psychology)

Each session would be unique and could consist of career ambassadors’ sharing, panel discussion and facility tour (if it is a physical session).

Register your interest here.

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RSAF Career Guidance Virtual Programme for Secondary 4 students

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RSAF Career Guidance Virtual Programme for Secondary 4 students

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Registration link

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Keen to learn about Environmental Law? Sign up for an engagement programme by the Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law (APCEL) at the National University of Singapore on 8th Nov

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Keen to learn about Environmental Law? Sign up for an engagement programme by the Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law (APCEL) at the National University of Singapore on 8th Nov

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We have received an invitation for a programme conducted by the Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law (APCEL) at the National University of Singapore. Please read the details below and sign up in the link provided if you are interested and available to attend.

When: 8th Nov

Timing: 1:00pm - 4:00pm

Where: NUS Law campus in Botanic Gardens - Transport from and to RGS campus will be provided

Max number of students: 40

Lunch will be kindly provided by NUS – please remember to bring your own cutlery, containers and cups.

Objective:

To introduce students to the law and policy perspective of environmental issues, so that they can engage with the latter more deeply. During the workshop, you will learn about different aspects of environmental law and there will be Q&A and a short campus tour at the end of the session.

This programme would be of particular interest to students who are considering studies in law or environmental sustainability. The programme is also intended to increase students’ access to and knowledge about higher education institutions, therefore no prior knowledge of law or environmental issues is necessary.

Sign up via the link here by 25th October.

Information on parents' consent, transport and other logistical details will be sent out to the students who register closer to the date.

Thank you!

Ms Mariya Angelova on behalf of the FC crew
Counsellor, Filiae Centre​

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RGS Alumnae Medical Forum - Egg Freezing and IVF

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RGS Alumnae Medical Forum - Egg Freezing and IVF

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Hear IVF experts talk about Egg Freezing & IVF. This is a free event organised by RGS Alumnae and all are welcome to attend!

Date: 15 October
Time: 3-5pm
Register here

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We recommend interested Y3 students to sign up for the "Finding my Ikigai" workshop.

Both workshops are suitable for Y4 students.

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Ministry of Home Affairs - Scholarships, Career Previews and Work Attachments

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Ministry of Home Affairs - Scholarships, Career Previews and Work Attachments

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Do you know what are the difference between public and private scholarships, as well as what are the implications on bond free scholarships? Find out all you need to know, to prepare yourself on a successful application by attending BrightSparks Virtual Fair on 23 & 24 Sep, 10am to 6pm. Get your burning questions answered LIVE by university and scholarship providers at the webinars. Register now at - https://v2.virtualrecruitmentdays.com/BSPFair2022/sch

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The Care Economy Explained: Trends, Skills & Jobs You Need to Know About

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The Care Economy Explained: Trends, Skills & Jobs You Need to Know About

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The Care Economy Explained: Trends, Skills & Jobs You Need to Know About | Myskillsfuture.gov.sg

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Learn more about the care economy and its trends, skills and jobs

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Abbott - Future Well Kids - Virtual Field Trip

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Abbott - Future Well Kids - Virtual Field Trip

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Abbott have developed a virtual field trip on the structure and function of our heart for students to explore and learn. They have also developed a Future Well Kids website which has many STEM related articles and activities for kids interested in STEM.

Website:https://futurewellkids.com/educators/virtualfieldtrip/#content

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I just found these great educational resources from Abbott and Discovery Education, I think you should check them out too!

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#SFF2021: Imagine if we could tokenize protected species! Corrado Chr. Forcellati from Paia Consulting and Benjamin Tsai from Wave Financial discuss the potential for tokenization to protect our biodiversity, and how far we are from making this a reality. Moderated by RGS alumna Lynette Lee.

Link to video

#SFF2021: Our very own Lynette Lee spoke to Vikram Chakravarty and Konstantinos Dimitriou from EY and EY-Parthenon to talk about the Economics of

ESG. Here are 4 golden rules for anyone looking to kickstart their ESG strategy journey:
• Materiality is key
• Ensure upside gained is larger than costs incurred
• Communicate effectively to the market
• ESG isn't just a box to tick off - Go big, or go home!

Link to video

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5 Ways to Get Started When You Just Don’t Feel Like It

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5 Ways to Get Started When You Just Don’t Feel Like It

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Key points

People often have a tough time switching gears from one task to another, especially when going from home to work or vice versa.

Increasing psychological space between life domains can help people get started and complete their goals.

By engaging more fully in activities, whatever or wherever they are, people can get more out of them and feel happier.

Are there days when you just can't get started even though you know you have a lot to do? When you wake up, do you resolve to begin tackling your most challenging tasks without any delay? Perhaps it's the beginning of the week and you have a long list of goals for what you need to have done by the end of the week. As you grab a quick breakfast, you head over to your closet to pick out what to wear but nothing seems quite right either for the weather or for what you've got planned for the day. Reaching into a drawer you find the perfect shirt, but it's too wrinkled for prime time. You've got a choice of deciding whether to spend a precious five minutes to iron it, or just find something else. By the time you're dressed and ready to go, you're already way behind.

These sorts of situations can happen commonly, making it likely that you will thwart your ability to accomplish your goals. It could be the situation with your clothes, or it could be something that needs attention with your home, your computer, your kids, or your mode of transportation. Life can get in the way of life.

According to Temple University's Ryan Vogel and colleagues (2021), although there is ample evidence to support the adage about the early bird catching the worm, "people do not always get right down to work each day" but instead linger in getting morning coffee, checking sports scores or online news updates, and-if in the workplace-chat with fellow employees. You're not alone, then, if you find yourself dawdling when you should be focusing.

The Concept of Speed of Engagement

To understand this common but puzzling behavior, the research team introduced the concept of "speed of engagement," which they define very simply as "how quickly an employee becomes energized and cognitively focused after beginning work." As background for their work, Vogel et al. use what's called "boundary theory" which concerns the way in which people negotiate transitions between their various domains of life but particularly between home and work. Because you perform best in one role when you've completely transitioned into it, by jumping into your work role-or whatever the transition is to-you up your chances for success.

There are obvious cognitive benefits to being immersed in what you're doing but, as Vogel and his colleagues point out, there are also emotional ones. In their words, "At a high speed of engagement, employees are quickly able to become enthusiastic about the workday." Being excited about your work can clearly benefit not only your productivity but your mood.

It's important to note that speed of engagement isn't limited to work settings. Any switch from one activity to another can involve similar processes. You can arrive home from work and either put off or quickly start preparing the evening meal. There are certainly many distractions at home that can mean major delays even in these presumably pleasurable tasks. You can also put off doing something around the house that needs fixing, or even beginning to work on one of your favorite crafts or hobbies.

In the overall model that Vogel and his colleagues tested, speed of engagement (in this case at work) is facilitated when people psychologically detach from home and reattach at work, which in turn, facilitates the level of engagement and ultimately their ability to meet their goals. Across two field studies conducted on large online samples of employees, the authors tested their model. In the first, they observed the relationships among these sets of factors over four different times of day.

Put yourself in the place of the participants by rating yourself on the following items:

Psychological detachment from home: "I have been able to forget about family/off-the-job concerns."

Morning work reattachment: "I have been thinking about what I want to achieve at work today."

Speed of engagement: "This morning, I quickly became immersed in my work."

Level of engagement: "I have felt energetic at my job."

Daily goal progress: "I fulfilled my roles and responsibilities more effectively than I typically do."

After obtaining data that supported their initial theoretical model, in the second study, they tested an intervention designed to enhance speed of engagement to determine the impact on goal progress. The interventions were administered using smartphone voice memo functions, which employees were taught to use on the first day. In the "home detachment" intervention, participants created a recording in which they listed their three most pressing home or family life tasks and then were told simply to detach from these until the end of the day. The work intervention involved similar instructions, but with regard to important work tasks.

Turning now to the findings of the intervention study, the results further supported the model in showing that efforts to reduce boundary transitions between home or family life concerns and the workplace enhanced speed of engagement, which in turn led to increased productivity.

You might be wondering how changes in the workplace due to COVID-19 would affect the findings given that working from home has become more commonplace. Indeed, the authors checked for this possibility because although the study was carried out in 2018, 53 percent of the sample actually did work from home. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no difference in the findings based on employee location at the time of the study.

5 Steps to Speed Up Your Engagement

By now, you are probably convinced that the idea of the "early bird" seems to be a good one based on this empirical study. On this basis, here are the five steps that can get you to a quicker on-ramp in starting your own day:

1. Create psychological space in between your role boundaries. Although the Vogel et al. study focused on work, the findings could easily apply to chores you might have to do in your non-work life. As enticing as it might be to remain in one of those spheres rather than switch to the other, tell yourself to set the previous one aside until after completing the other set of tasks. This is the most clear-cut conclusion from the study, but the other four follow from its logic as well.

2. Catch the most obvious distractions that keep you from becoming fully engaged in your current task. Is it that online sports score you need to check, or perhaps there's a vacation site calling your name? Come up with a list of the information you need to get for the task you're trying to leave behind and make an "appointment" with yourself to get to it later.

3. Reward yourself in a series of steps for staying on task. An old cognitive behavioral trick is to help build in a new behavior by providing reinforcement in small doses. Start with one hour of no distractions and then you can take a minute to engage in something that counts as a reward for you. Then you can build up to longer intervals, such as mornings before lunch break. If the Vogel et al. model is correct, you'll actually end up being so engaged in whatever you're doing that you forget about the distractions altogether.

4. Ask people in each setting to help you maintain your role separation. You may have a colleague at work who loves chatting about new recipes or the latest movie. Without being too curt, request that the colleague let you return to the task at hand, promising to chat later when there's a break.

5. Don't let guilt preoccupy your mind. One of the toughest aspects of leaving home behind for work or vice versa is the tendency that people have to feel that they're being disloyal or uncaring by switching gears. Instead of letting those multiple obligations distract you further, resolve to focus your energy entirely on meeting one set of goals so that you can then go back to focusing 100 percent on the ones that you've temporarily set aside.

To sum up, by creating psychological space between your various life domains, these five approaches can help you maximize your fulfillment in each and every one.
LinkedIn image: LightField Studios/Shutterstock. Facebook image: ic36006/Shutterstock

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5 Ways to Get Started When You Just Don't Feel Like It

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People often have a tough time switching gears from one task to another, especially when going from home to work or vice versa. Increasing psychological space between life domains can help people get started and complete their goals. By engaging more fully in activities, whatever or wherever they are, people can get more out of them and feel happier.

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The Building Financial Fitness Podcast with RGS alumna Junus Eu

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The Building Financial Fitness Podcast with RGS alumna Junus Eu

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Nov 04, 2021  |  35m 41s
"You're not lazy, you're just afraid to try" - The Brutally Honest Career Advice You Need to Hear (w Kenneth Lee)

Link to podcats

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NYC's On My Way - resources for career exploration and school holiday programmes

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NYC's On My Way - resources for career exploration and school holiday programmes

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Learn about the different jobs and industries, connect with schooling seniors and industry professionals and get a taster into various job roles of your interest.    Website: https://www.nyc.gov.sg/omw/home

Know it all - industry and job-specific information

'Day in the life' videos

Let's talk - live streams

Network connects - community of youths

Taster programmes

Interest quiz

ECG resources

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Empower2Free e-learning for investment and insurance

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Empower2Free e-learning for investment and insurance

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Empower2Free (by RGS alumna Cynthia Wong) is an organisation that focuses on how young people can make informed choices confidently and be financially empowered.

Students can sign up for the free digital learning platform with bite-size financial courses for youths that include insurance and investment etc.

We are happy to share that some of our alumni (Y5 students) who took part in the Work Experience Programme with Empower2Free have contributed to the content creation.

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The Explorer E Newsletter - 3nd Edition 

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The Explorer E Newsletter - 3nd Edition 

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IN FOCUS: How young Singaporeans are turning their passions into profit with side hustles

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IN FOCUS: How young Singaporeans are turning their passions into profit with side hustles

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Soon after, she began to get requests for commissioned work.

"Initially, I charged really, really cheap because I felt that it was just something that I really like to do. But after a while it was a bit more serious and I felt like I should start charging according to how long I take (carving the stamps)."

The negative news cycle stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic could also be motivating employees to just try something new, said Mr Adrian Tan.

While adapting to new working conditions while working from home, employees may start to look for other outlets to let off steam, he added.

The flexibility of working from home, for many employees, means people have more bandwidth to engage in hobbies or take up other jobs, said IHRP's Mr Tan.

"I think the barrier to entry to starting something on the side right now is really decreasing, especially the way you can go to market."

For Ms Kwek Xiuyi, her polymer clay earring business clay.et.al was at its peak during the circuit breaker period.

Describing it as her "most efficient" period, the 31-year-old research associate, who works in a biology laboratory, said she could churn out a new collection of earrings every month because she was working from home.

"This is really like a hobby and then it accidentally turned into a business. Earnings-wise, it's not as important because it all started from a hobby," said Ms Kwek.

"Of course if people like my creations, that would be great, I'll be very happy that people like them."

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IN FOCUS: How young Singaporeans are turning their passions into profit with side hustles

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Many dream of making money off their hobbies, but it's not always easy getting there. CNA speaks to young people who juggle a full-time job and a side hustle to find out how they do it, and examines how the employment landscape may be changing to offer more opportunities.

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https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/the-value-of-work-and-the-worth-of-an-individu

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Forget cramming, ditch the highlighter, and stop passively rereading. The psychology of learning offers better tactics

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It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so.
- quotation from the 19th century, likely apocryphal

The year was 1993 and, aged 16, I was about to sit my Geography GCSE exam. This was an 'old school' style public examination, held in the school's gymnasium. A stifling odour of floor wax and dust hung heavy in the air. Victorian-era single desks featuring ink wells that had been utterly redundant for about three generations were arranged into rows with unerring precision. The silence was so unnatural and oppressive, it seemed to have a tangible density.

Nonetheless, I had crammed for this exam like a champion and was feeling confident. I took a deep breath, opened my examination booklet and glanced over the first page of questions. A gut-wrenching realisation quickly dawned on me, captured perfectly by a single piece of graffiti etched into the haggard surface of my desk. It read: 'Oh Sh*t! There goes college, 1992.'

Clearly, I hadn't been the only one whose confidence in their exam preparation was misplaced. However, it wouldn't be until I started teaching psychology some 12 years later that I fully understood why. Here's the bad news: research from psychology indicates that our ability to accurately monitor and evaluate our level of knowledge or skill (referred to as metacognitive ability) is often flawed. These flaws tend to give us an inflated perception of our knowledge and understanding, encouraging us to persevere with ineffective methods of studying that quietly, but persistently, undermine our efforts to learn. It's easy to demonstrate this by examining some preferred study practices and considering the misconceptions about learning that they reflect. Let's kick off things by looking at that perennial favourite: cramming.

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
- from Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899) by William James

We've probably all done it at some point. The evening before the big exam, source materials sprawled out on the desk, a stockpile of energy drinks substituting for the intravenous caffeine line that would be so much more efficient (patent pending). Productivity is the order of the day, after all; it's cramming time. Sure enough, research confirms that cramming is a go-to strategy for many students. However, since the late 19th century, research in psychology has demonstrated that distributing your study time over a number of shorter sessions works better than cramming all the work into one marathon session. This is known as 'the spacing effect'. It's one of those rare findings in psychology that goes pretty much uncontested, which makes it even more perplexing that more of us don't take advantage of it.

Another routine approach to study is to repeatedly reread sources. It's not difficult to explain why students rely on this approach. If you read a piece of text repeatedly, that text will start to feel familiar. You will likely interpret this feeling of familiarity as progress. Unfortunately, this perception of progress is often illusory. It reflects a failure to consider a vital difference between study and exam conditions: things always seem easy when you have the answers in front of you. Inconveniently, most exams don't allow you that luxury.

A reliance on passively rereading material when studying also reflects a more fundamental misconception about the nature of memory. We often view memory as being akin to a somewhat unreliable camera; not so much an SLR, more one of those Victorian jobbies - the kind that required 30 minutes of exposure to capture a portrait, during which time the subjects had to remain utterly still or else the photo would be ruined. This reproductive notion of memory lulls us into thinking that successfully remembering a source boils down to the amount of exposure we give it and that interacting with that source will likely only 'interfere with the shot'. However, thinking of memory as if it worked like a recalcitrant camera is misleading and really unhelpful when you're studying.

Our memory doesn't passively reproduce a source: it actively reconstructs it according to our previous knowledge, experience and expectations. To stick with the photographic analogy, the workings of memory are more like the filters on a photo-editing suite than a camera. Using our memory effectively is less about maximising exposure to a new source than figuring out how to use our prior knowledge, experience and expectation filters to integrate that source with what we already know.

Do not mistake activity with achievement.
- a favourite maxim of the US basketball coach John Wooden

As you can see, then, the most common approaches to studying are often not what psychologists would recommend. I'm painfully aware that even when faced with evidence that study methods such as cramming and rereading are relatively ineffective, you'll probably still harbour an inclination to fall back on these habits. You might argue: 'Cramming has got me this far, so it can't be completely ineffectual.' You'd be right; it isn't completely ineffectual. However, there are far superior alternatives, especially if your goal is to retain what you're studying for any length of time. Had I studied properly for my geography exam all those years ago, I might now be able to remember more than just the names of four of the mechanisms of coastal erosion. (Not that this doesn't make me a blast to sit next to at dinner, you understand.)

So, having identified a few studying approaches that aren't all they're cracked up to be, let's consider some more effective alternatives. The approaches I'm about to advocate are good practice irrespective of what subject you are studying and do not require any prior knowledge of psychology to implement. By making fairly basic changes to the way you study, you can improve your learning, follow the example of high-achieving students, and turn the process of studying from a chore that must be endured into an activity that can be enjoyed.

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How to study effectively | Psyche Guides

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It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so.- quotation from the 19th century, likely apocryphal The year was 1993 and, aged 16, I was about to sit my Geography GCSE exam.

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BrightSparks July 2021 scholarship magazine

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BrightSparks July 2021 scholarship magazine

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The online version of the BrightSparks July 2021 magazine is available now!
Hit the link to read about outstanding youths who went above and beyond to serve their communities and top scholars from highly sought-after organisations.

👉  https://bit.ly/376xANV

The annual BrightSparks survey is still ongoing. The inputs from students will be invaluable to the stakeholders in the scholarship arena.

Link to survey: https://bit.ly/3o3obhT

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Editor's Note Like many of us, I was looking forward to a semblance of normalcy at the beginning of this year. The number of workers infected in dormitories had reduced to zero, community infections were on the downtrend and more people were getting vaccinated.

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The Explorer E Newsletter - 2nd Edition 

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The Explorer E Newsletter - 2nd Edition 

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Students Ask Video Series

Ms Chloe Ong Singapore Digital Scholarship recipient Year 2 student with Singapore Polytechnic studying Diploma of Information Security Management

Ms Doreen Tan

User and Content Operations Manager in TikTok Singapore

Ms Kelly An

Software Engineer in PayPal

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Youth Voices: Turning Points In My Education

“Six months of hard work, what was it all for if you lose?”

“Give up on my dreams or re-take the O-Levels?”

“I was offered my 12th choice at poly”

“Retained at Sec 3, but it worked for me”

What do you do when your dream seems unreachable?

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Schoolbag.sg provides parents, educators and the general public with education news, school features and tips.

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RGS Online Career Conversations - will resume in 2022

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RGS Online Career Conversations - will resume in 2022

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The Online Career Conversations series is back and we are excited to welcome more alumni and other industry professionals during the school holidays.

Open to Y1-Y4 students! Sign up & more information in the Google Form.