In 2000, I met up with Professor Ken Heskin (the first Swinburne Sarawak Pro Vice-Chancellor) who was looking for a Head of Studies to help with the academic programmes. We had an informal interview and at the end of an hour, Ken told me I was hired. For us, it was ground zero. We did everything and anything. There was no such thing as: ‘this is not my job’. If there was a hole to plug, we plugged it. I actually did timetabling on paper - lots and lots of paper! The first 10 staff started in June. Until James Ho joined us as marketing manager, Ken had a team of all girls. We used to tease him that we were Ken’s angels.

The lucky thing about the original team was that we worked very closely with the Board of Directors. At our first orientation, 30 vocational students arrived at our hostels. We had never managed students before, and they got a little bit rowdy. We were three girls and Ken Heskin. Maybe we were not so good at crowd control, especially with post SPM high school leavers! I remember, it was after 11pm and I was not sure how we were going to manage these boys. So, we called our partners at Yayasan Sarawak and I remember they actually came in person – Datu Rashid and Datuk Abu. They were very hands on. We finished at 1am or 2am. It was an eye opener for us. That’s the beauty when you start something from scratch. Everybody is a team member.