Last night I attended the SFU #SIATmixer, where employers, graduates and students of the SIAT school can meet’n’greet.

As a long-term supporter of the SIAT talent, I like to tag along and speak to a couple of people and feel the vibe in the school. And lo! Who did I bump into but Scott, the first intern / co-op student I employed from the SIAT co-op program?!

And..Kitty, the next intern! And, Lillian, my colleague and all-round starlet of MarComms, who began as our next intern after Kitty.

[Not present, Solomon, the next next intern, travelling back from Asia where we has been recording some work for us in Singapore and Manila.]

Being surrounded by all this talent, including those I had in my team, I realised something important: these young, urgent, motivated students had helped me learn so, so much. #Blessed.

Scott was my first intern, and neither of us knew what we were doing. We gave him some random projects to work on, and had no idea wheat we were trying to achieve.

Nonetheless, Scott’s research lead directly to us adopting Yammer – where we bizarrely became the world’s first company to use Yammer-as-intranet, replacing our old SharePoint instance. Thanks Scott, yo!

We parted ways, and went again, this time chancing upon a designer called (Hello!) Kitty Chan. A new learning experience: having a designer at hand, we created design projects for her, we learned how we could add services and value. We broke our own design paradigm – we took chances, we experimented, we became more progressive.

Then came Lillian, and thankfully she stayed around, and we co-created plans around social and design, such that we are industry leaders in building social relationships and telling our social story. Tomorrow’s efforts will be better still.

Each time we went back to SIAT for talent, we have taken it to the proverbial next level yo!

We challenge the students to bring their A game to our workplace. We ask a lot of them, to understand our organizational methodology and to add value to it. And they do it, every time. They add something that we didn’t have before. They make the team a better one. They make me a better worker. I learn from them; such that I can keep pushing forward.

So, here’s to SIAT! Here’s to (intern) talent! Here’s to a better tomorrow yo!

←This Much We Know.→