Michelle Lim started Chatsworth Medi@rt Academy’s M.A.D. (Marketing, Advertising & Design) School to equip students with real-world working experience.

The year was 1996. It was Michelle Lim’s second day of work as a trader at a top investment firm in Singapore. But she could barely hold herself together as she watched her colleagues buy and sell stocks for their clients. She knew immediately it was not the life for her. She walked across the trading floor, entered the boss’ office and announced her intention to quit. “I told my boss I was too stressed out to do the job, but the truth is, I knew on my first day this wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” she recalls.

So, in 2003, when Lim started Chatsworth Medi@rt Academy’s M. A.D. (Marketing, Adve rtising & Design) School, she dedicated herself to equipping students with real-world working experience and skills that meet current market demands. She hoped that by doing so, fewer graduates would face a mismatch in their careers like she did.

At M.A.D. School, industry players curate the syllabus, and students are taught only by current practitioners in the field so as to provide them with a realistic view of their future. This strategy appears to be effective. M.A.D. School is considered one of Singapore’s more avantgarde design institutions. Its students have bagged awards in the creative and design field, from Crowbars to Yellow Pencil accolades.

“I knew it would not work if we only trained designers to design. We needed designers to understand how to market their products in the real world, so we created the first school in Asia that incorporated marketing and advertising with design,” she explains.

Lim was determined to provide her students with as much industry exposure as possible. She worked with a makeshift team of industry players — from CEOs to art directors and copywriters — and devised her own syllabus. “I actually asked CEOs what skills they were looking for,” she says. “And when we put the syllabus together, I asked the CEOs again, ‘Would you hire these students?’”

Lim was also adamant that the lecturers be current industry practitioners in order to remain relevant to students. Some of them, like Pocket Magazine’s creative director Andrew Tan, have won a host of international awards. Others come with impressive portfolios and a long client list: Felix Ng’s works have generally received good reviews in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Monocle, while Muhammad Suhaimi Pa’at has done work for a range of clients including the government and Getty Images.

At M.A.D. School, students spend one-fifth of their time individually with lecturers in a mandatory mentorship programme. Sessions can be intense, with lecturers picking apart their work during each 30-minute meeting. On top of that, full-time students are encouraged to do an internship or exchange programme in Europe, through its partnership with non-profit global leadership development organisation, AIESEC. Although most arts schools claim to provide practical and industry-focused experience, Lim insists M.A.D. School is different. “When schools market themselves as industry-oriented, usually they mean internship. But the problem with internship is you cannot control what employers will do to your kids,” she says, “What we do [apart from internship] is emphasise portfoliobuilding because we believe a portfolio will eventually replace the value of a degree in the workplace.”

Lim adds, “Throughout their course, students visit creative design agencies to show their work. They get direct critique from top executives and this provides them with the opportunity to network with industry players and build their own portfolio.” For example, a student’s digital marketing pitch to one of her lecturer’s clients was successfully implemented.

Another avenue for students to build their portfolio is through the Awards Lab, which is essentially a programme that trains students to win awards. “We don’t pick the cream of the crop. So long as you can answer the design brief, you can participate,” she says. Students are then trained by award-winning creative directors once every week, paid for by the school, to help them win awards.

The school also has an incubation programme for weaker students. Lim set up a company within M.A.D to take on commercial projects from paying clients. Students in the programme will have to pitch and implement their work for these clients. “Our first client was Prudential, with a contract worth six figures.”

Once a year, Lim and her team review the school syllabus. “Once, we cancelled the media planning subject, and integrated it with the art direction subject. Students will have to cope with the sudden changes, which trains them to adapt quickly when they start working.”

Tough upbringing
Lim was born and raised in Johor, Malaysia. Her family were charcoal wholesalers. Her aunts, uncles and cousins were far wealthier; they were bankers and lawyers. She recalls squatting by the fire, watching over hot charcoals during school holidays. By the end of the day, her hands were black with charcoal stains, which drew curious questions from other children at school. Her mother would tell her: “If you don’t study hard, you will end up like us.”

It drove her to excel in her studies. After completing the Malaysian-equivalent of the O-levels, she moved to Singapore. As her parents could not afford to send her to Europe to pursue her studies like her cousins did, she went on to study Economics at the Singapore Institute of Management. She also took investment classes to prepare her for working life.

However, the world of high finance turned out to be very different from what Lim had expected. “The reality of the job just didn’t match what I dreamt it would be,” she says. All her life, she had been so certain she wanted to be a banker or fund manager, with no reason to doubt her ambition — until then.

After quitting, Lim started applying for any job she could so she could pay her bills. Adult education school Informatics finally took her in as a management trainee. “That was how my career in the education industry began,” she says. “I brought university programmes from Asia to Australia to the local market. I was learning a university function.” She excelled at her role, and in 2000, she was asked to join Coleman Education Group as an executive director.

When she recruited students for Coleman Creative Centre, she found herself increasingly drawn to the creative design field, stretching her imagination and pushing the boundaries of creativity.

She soon realised, however, that good design courses were lacking in Singapore, and a large number did not prepare students for what they would face in the local market. “Asian students are very obedient. We all want to produce work that pleases our lecturers, but a lot of times, design pieces that please the academic community do not necessarily appeal to clients,” she says. In the early 2000s, the majority of design courses were adapted or taken directly from Western countries.

“What we need is to train students to look at the culture around them and what their clients here actually want. For many local clients, design is the last thing they will spend money on, so it is even more crucial you learn how to pitch to them effectively,” Lim says.

Enthralled by her newfound interest, Lim approached the design world with the singular determination she once had for finance. She wanted to start a new design course at Coleman but her boss dismissed the idea, so she left to start her own school.

In 2003, Chatsworth Medi@rt Academy’s M.A.D. School was born on a shoestring budget of $20,000, with $6,000 coming from Lim’s savings. Her co-founders included a former head of Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s business school, a director of a private education institute, and two other business owners in the education space.

Niche player
Operating on the floor above Jumbo Seafood restaurant at Clarke Quay, the school had a grand total of three students from Vietnam when it first started. Soon, the numbers picked up. Last year, it took in 145 students. According to Lim, 35% of its students are degree holders, and range from lawyers to swimming instructors. Another 25% are from polytechnics, while the rest are O-level and N-level graduates as well as employment pass holders.

Many of its students and alumni say the school provides a clear path to the creative industries, especially for those without a design background. Andy Xu is one example. An underachiever in his school days with only a talent for basketball, he never had high hopes for his future. He entered culinary school, hoping to make something of his life. But he was soon diagnosed with eczema, and had to leave the trade.

“It was then that I recalled I enjoyed doodling when I was a child, but I had never really thought I could do it for a living. At my wits’ end, I decided to use my savings and enter a private design school,” he says.

Xu eventually settled on M.A.D. School’s part-time diploma in visual communication. He describes the staff as focused in helping him achieve his full potential while the lecturers challenged him to strive harder.

“I was also inspired by so many peers of similar or worse family backgrounds who were as hungry as I was to succeed,” he says. Xu became art director of one of the biggest global marketing companies today, Ogilvy & Mather, and now runs his own creative firm, Three Collective.

Xu is among M.A.D School’s many graduates who have found success. According to a survey it conducted, 70% of its alumni received a salary boost after graduating from the school. Most have gone on to work for creative agencies.

For some, the school was a stepping stone to get into other universities and institutions — at least one has received a full scholarship to pursue a degree at LaSalle College of Arts. Some others have joined small and mediumsized enterprises.

“When they graduate, they usually ‘sell like hot cakes’ to SMEs because they can multi-task. They have sufficient knowledge to understand market demands as well as the tools to apply them to their designs,” Lim says.

Staying nimble
Today, M.A.D. School offers five programmes — four diplomas and one professional certificate course. It recently added a diploma and a certificate in photography.

Lim is on a crusade to help everyone keep up with the evolving job market, and is not stopping at just an arts school. Chatsworth Medi@rt Academy is expanding its programmes to younger students and older executives. It has also launched a programme with a neighbourhood school to let students use the crowd-funding platform to market their ideas.

Her next mission is to launch the design and code executive course for working adults. “There is a lot of demand for coders in Singapore. We will use the open source system because in today’s market, you need to develop the capability and learn how to navigate the fastgrowing open source community,” she says, adding that design is useful because many coders deal with user interface outlook today.

But will the academy grow big enough to challenge international names like LaSalle? “Universities are like dinosaurs; you can’t change professors in a short span of time. But in today’s world, you need to constantly innovate and recreate curriculum. We can keep up only if we stay nimble.” There is no plan to expand the school’s size right now, but she says the academy will continue to create integrative programmes to meet market demands.

Staying small may be the best bet for a school that is constantly evolving. The academy saw some rough days when it switched its policy to only accept local residents as students. During this time, four founders left when they could not afford to pump in more capital.

Still, Lim is not afraid that the academy will lose out to bigger players in the market. She says, “We have no term break. Our course fee is almost $20,000. People who come to us have to be serious.”

Besides, she adds confidently, “It is a very disruptive world right now. In the US, community development colleges, where students teach one another, are booming. In Singapore, the education system is also changing things. This is a very ‘rebellious’ school. We don’t believe in degrees, but we will give you what it takes to enter the industry.”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 713 (Feb 1) of The Edge Singapore.