I am just surprised about how worse the Singapore community's attitude towards students in their development for future. It is ironic that you need to lie (meaning don't ever mention that you are a student trying to research for study) in order to be treated equally as a customer, or else their attitude towards you will change. Still don't get what I am trying to explain? Here's to elaborate.

I am an Interior Design student from RDI, and the main success to our courses are to understand the projects we are doing as well as to understand the site we are trying to insert the design. Well, we don't get sites documentation for free. Most of the time we need to do excursions by ourselves to find sites and request permission to analyze the site. This is the part where I say it is important NOT TO MENTION that you are a student, you have to be tricky in explaining your own purpose to why learning the site. I have had a fair share of bad experience, again back to how Singapore community is treating their country's student.

You are REJECTED, you are not given permission to analyze the site, the attitude of the person-in-charge of the site is bad towards you, and sometimes you even get chased away! Other lenient rejection are such as "You should have sent a request by email a week ago", "sorry we don't have an appointment", "you shouldn't have barged in like that", etc. Oh my God, I hope these people understand that rejection couldn't be much easier for them through emails and phones, which is what we (students) will try to avoid. And to conclude how bad it gets, we even need to sneak-up to the sites to take photographs (and on the emergency floor plan) and analyze those available information, only to get a 60 in our marks. Well that is for me, but what about those students who are unlucky? To only wait until they fail the subject and re-take it for at least SGD1, 500? (project-based courses are of the highest credit, therefore they are the most expensive) I once even thought about bribing the person-in-charge for SGD500 dollars just to get the information I need, but of course that would be pathetic although it's better than failing the subject (which would cost more).

Sure, they are trying to protect private property (by not letting us take photos). Sure, they are busy (which is the worst excuse to their bad attitude towards us). But, shouldn't these people treat us with a little dignity instead of acknowledging us as annoyance? One very funny case is when I had a project of designing a elderly care homes. I wanted a site, visited, only to get told by one of the staff that the manager rejected me immediately. "A student?No, I'm very busy. I have said that I don't want to hear anything about students. Can you please tell that students to go away." that is what I heard from behind the manager's office.

Jeez, even I don't want to visit your site if not for the sake of my education. You are a manager of an elderly care homes, of which you should know everyone is a potential customers because you need donations. I don't even want to take any elderly care homes projects after I graduate simply because I have had a bad experience with one of its managers. What a self-centered persons who only think about their jobs few hours ahead to not be disturbed by mere students.

I am not generalizing here, because not all Singapore community treats students like that. I have had a few success in interacting with sites' person-in-charge. But to even date back, most of the nice managers are foreigners (from US, Europe, etc). I am not trying to conclude to this point, but I suspect that Singapore community towards the younger (especially students) need to improve much more.