Master of Public Affairs at Cal's Goldman School of Public Policy: I decided to take a career break to focus on some of my interests. Cal had always been my dream school, with a strong faculty known for social activism, entrepreneurship and tech. I geeked out at the Goldman School of Public Policy, focusing on tech policy, economics and data science.

Digital Consultancy for the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project: I had the good fortune of speaking to Barbara Haya, who is a leading authority in the study of outcomes and design of carbon trading and offsetting programs. She shared some of her organisation's workflow problems with me, and I thought it was a good opportunity to apply the Singapore framework of workflow digitalisation. I ended up spinning up a prototype database, APIs and automated data extraction for her group, and also developed an open source dashboard application for her group to visualise the data.

Storytelling for an International Audience: I've always enjoyed creating content and storytelling, but I had never done it for anyone outside of Singapore. California gave me the opportunity to share my view of the United States through the cultural lens of a Singaporean, bringing me even to KQED for a radio broadcast.

Digital Transformation: I'm glad I had the opportunity to work with some of the best software engineers and designers in the Singapore public service. It was a privilege to be able to dream big with them, set up TransformGovSG, and then create a suite of digital AI products that could accelerate policy making in the government.

Telling Stories Across the Public Service: The best part of my job in GovTech was really getting invited to all these public forums, giving talks alongside senior officials I never thought I'd brush shoulders with, and speaking to inquisitive Gen-Zers I never thought I'd ever have a common topic with. Storytelling is really so much fun, and an awesomely rewarding experience.

Reskilling Again: Till this day, I remain grateful to my bosses for giving me the opportunity to reskill. I remember knocking on the doors of GovTech asking for a job, and knowing nothing about software engineering at all. But not only did they give me a chance, they also generously supported me to pick up skillsets across product management, software engineering, design thinking and engineering leadership. From Stanford, no less!

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Creating RogueTeacher: I applied for 6 months of No-Pay Leave to help support my family through a rough patch. My second kid had just been born, and my wife was trying to get back to work, so I took to babysitting two toddlers for half a year. During this period of time, I picked up web design, blockchain development and created RogueTeacher as a side project. Who knew I would go on to pick up full-stack software engineering later on at GovTech?

Healthcare Finance Analyst: I was lucky to get a job at the Ministry of Health, Singapore as a policy analyst. It was a time in my career where I was able to grow as a professional data analyst, and also learn about the healthcare system in Singapore. Much of my work revolved around sensitive data, and it was a period of time where I didn't quite dabble with content creation and storytelling as much as I would have liked to. But good times nonetheless, and I learnt so much about policy analysis in R and Python.

First Taste of Digital Product Management: During the COVID-19 pandemic, I developed a passion for digital product management. It was serendipitous, somewhat precipitated by me partnering GovTech to develop a novel way of verifying and authenticating vaccination certificates on the blockchain. It was the first time I had built something for the public service, and the first time where my individual work was reported on so many fronts across the public service, media outlets and even blockchain news sites.

Data Science for Public Policy: I worked on public communications and policy sentiment research for a year. But I got bored with my job and picked up the newly-emerging field of data science with the help of the John Hopkins University online course, fronted by the now world-renowned Andrew Ng of DeepLearning.ai fame. Turns out there was an entire host of problem statements that I could solve with the methods I had learnt, and that was my first foray into the world of coding.

Storytelling Through Data: Data science and analytics really opened up a new world of possibilities for me to explain complex policy issues in simple but visually compelling ways. This was the first time in my career where I would be invited to speak at several forums across the public service, and I enjoyed my work so much that I even ended up offering consultancy for several government agencies. Who knew I could do this?

Teaching with Stories: I started my career as a Physics teacher, but quickly realised that what I always wanted to do was to teach through storytelling. And you know, science was the right stage to do it, with the right mix of fireballs, rockets and other exciting experiments, each of which I spun a tale around. It really was the best job I ever had, even until today.