With our recent Organising Committee (O'Comm) Recruitment that concluded in November 2023, our expanded O'Comm have been working very hard over the recent break to ensure that our students get to maximise their experience while engaging in our club's activities! As such, here's an overview of our upcoming events, activities and initiatives that we'll be intending to carry out over the coming semester. Enjoy!

With Publicity being our largest Team within our O'Comm, our Publicity Team members have been working behind-the-scenes to revamp our various branding assets, in order to freshen our students' experience when interacting with our club. Many assets have been generated over the holidays, including logo variants, Zoom backgrounds and banner designs - all to support our Partnerships and Curriculum Teams in their outreach efforts over the coming semester. Through these initiatives, we hope to increase our club's awareness in the long run - allowing our students to truly recognise us as a premier platform for students to embark their journey in their pursuit of kickstarting a product career.

With the recent launch of our club website, our Publicity Team will be formally kickstarting our blog section, with bi-weekly articles scheduled to educate our students on various product topics throughout the semester. In addition, we will also be moving forward with our podcast sessions, which will tentatively be recorded over the first half of our second semester. Episode 1 - featuring Harry and Kayleigh - has been successfully filmed, and will be released over the next week or two from this writing.

Returning with an exciting instructor line-up, Jason and his new team of instructors will be leading the charge in providing our new participants a fruitful experience - as our participants embark on a learning journey throughout this six-week programme to pick up fundamental skills on product management. Together with our new Curriculum Executives, who were previously participants in Semester 1, we hope to provide an enhanced experience for our future iterations of PM1101E: Exposure to Product Management.

Our run this semester will consist of:

• 24 participants - split into 6 groups of 4 each;

• 5 full-time instructors, including Jason - returning from our previous semester;

• office hours - dedicated consultation slots for our participant groups to receive constructive feedback on their ongoing projects before our Internal Product Competition;

• a Certificate Design Tournament - a side activity introduced in PM1101E to engage our participants in a fun manner. The winner of 8 possible designs will be finalised and distributed to our participants at the end of our programme.

• a collaboration with SMU Product Club - where 2 of our sessions will be combined with their flagship Product Management Experience (PME) programme to provide a cohesive experience between our two clubs!

Besides PM1101E, our Curriculum Team is also exploring other methods and topics to provide value to our students' prospective product careers - including holding technical workshops such as a Career Resume Workshop in Week 4 and a Product Analytics with Tableau Workshop (in collaboration with NUS Statistics and Data Science Society) in Week 6. More details will be released closer to their opening sign-up windows, as our team finalises the administrative aspects of these workshops over the coming weeks.

In collaboration with Sharing and Giving Experiences (SAGE), our team is also in the midst of organising a Product Case Competition - which will tentatively be held in Recess Week. This 6-hour event is meant to be a simulation of an actual case interview performed in job searches for full-time product roles, and we intend to reward prizes to our top students who can perform well under such a time constraint. Student participants are expected to have some baseline knowledge of product management, as we are currently discussing with full-time professionals to firm up administrative details such as event format and judging criteria for the competition.

As this event is tentatively part of a two-part event series, the second part of this series will be a Career Discovery Workshop featuring our club, SAGE and NUS Centre for Future-Ready Graduates - where students will get a chance to role play as product managers, to understand how a PM collaborates with other stakeholders such as the end users, developers and analysts while working in tech sprints. More information will be released closer to the respective event dates.

Deviating away from fireside chats as its main expertise, our Partnerships Team's main focus this coming semester will be the launch of our new Industrial Attachments (IA) programme. In collaboration with 8 different startups from various fields, 16 students will be selected to practice what they have learnt in class in order to gain proper working experience in product roles, before moving on to subsequent internships and full-time roles. While the initial intention is for our IA programme to be extended to only our past PM1101E participants, we have now opened this to the public in order to offer our experience to a wider audience.

For participants with a lack of proper experience or who did not attend PM1101E beforehand, a 4-hour crash course will be held in-person by our Partnerships Team - featuring an initial brief of the entire 10-week programme, as well as the 4 sessions covered in Semester 1's iteration of PM1101E - as we now call PM1101C: PM1101E Compressed.

With the success of our first 2 Parts of PM Career Series in Semester 1, our club is now collaborating together with SMU Product Club and the newly established NTU Product Club to plan Part 3 of our PM Career Series - featuring a fireside chat with up to 5 full-time PMs, before proceeding on with a freestyle networking events between students and professionals from different backgrounds working in product roles. The event is tentatively planned for March 2024, and will likely be hosted at SMU Connexion Level 5 Event Square. More details will be announced closer to the event date.

With an exciting lineup moving ahead, along with a profile makeover, I'm more than thrilled to see how our club will carry out its various events and activities for our upcoming semester! Through such experiences, we hope that we can reach out more students who are either exploring product management, or are trying to deviate from their existing roles. See you in our upcoming events!