Blog Post 4: Evaluating Intercultural Behavior

When I worked in a restaurant, I had to face different customers from different countries. Indeed, they are very different in their behaviors. I shall just illustrate on some groups of people here.

Japanese: Usually, I can classify Japanese customers into two types. One type is family gathering; the other type is business related dining. For the first group of people, usually, the male dominates the whole process; women just follow and eat what has been ordered. For the second group of people, they are more formal and they follow the hierarchy strictly during the dining. Sometimes, when the important guest arrives, the juniors even queue up nicely and bow to the guest. They treat their senior staff or guests like god which is rarely seen in any other cultures. Generally, they are polite and the tables are very clean after eating. However, they do not give tips to the service.

Indonesian: Usually, they are very rich people who always in restaurants. They like to enjoy good service so that some of them even tip the staff before they order the food. They are very generous especially for those who always come to our restaurant.

Westerners: They are generally very generous, too. However, they like to enjoy the environment more than the food itself. They like to order a lot of drink and always response to the services provided courteously which is very heartwarming to the service staffs.

Religious Groups: For customers with certain religions, they have restrictions on certain types of food. Some of them are very particular about this. So the staffs have to be very careful when serving them.

Some people may think that serving food in restaurant is easy. But I would say, if you want to provide good service to your customers, it is not so easy, especially when you work in a place like Singapore, where it is very international. Spending some time to understand your customers, your life will be a lot easier and, sometimes, it is rewarding as well.

Blog Post : Potential Research Project Topics

Student accommodation on NUS campus is always a hot issue among NUS students. However, students may realize that it is much more difficult to secure a place in anyone of the student hostels than before. The purpose of this research is to give NUS students a better understanding of the current situation in the issue of student accommodation so that they could have a better plan before it is too late to look for alternative sources for accommodation.

There are many reasons for the fact that students in NUS have to put in more effort in their CCA and pay more for the accommodations on campus. For simplicity purpose, I only focus the discussion on the pricing of the stay on campus.

For the supply side of the problem, NUS is not able to create more rooms for the students in the short term. This is due to the limitation of the land around the campus. Also, it will take quite some time to get the job done. So it is not possible to increase the supply in the short term. The number of rooms available for the students is fixed.

However, the demand from the students is increasing more rapidly. Every year, NUS has to provide accommodation for certain groups of people like exchange student, USP students, first year for the local students and first two years of stay for overseas students and so on. So the rooms left are quite limited. In order to get the room, the students have to compete with their CCA points from University or Hall activities. The points needed for a room in the history almost kept unchanged until this year. The increase in the CCA points surprised many students. Many people became homeless in a sudden and need to look for other ways to solve the problem. However, the off-campus rental is also expensive since the property price in Singapore has appreciated a lot since last year. Therefore, more students want to stay on campus. Furthermore, the number of freshmen in NUS this year is a lot more than the past. And this number will keep growing in the future. These factors all make the competition for a room on campus more intense.

The only thing the OSA did to reduce the demand is to increase the price. The price for a room in this academic year has increased 25% based on the previous figures. And it will increase again for the following years. However, this is not very effective as the general price level and the rental for a room outside campus increased much more than the increase in a room on campus.

The OSA also changed the waiting list policy from the first-come-first-serve basis to the balloting approach. The students have less control about the process in this case. However, this did not reduce the demand. The students on the waiting list could not do any planning before knowing the outcome of the process.

To complete the research, I would like to conduct a survey to randomly selected NUS undergraduates to ask their feedbacks on the campus stay and other alternatives. Also, I am interested to know how much effort they are willing to put in for their CCAs to secure a place on campus based on different prices for the room. The purpose of the survey is to illustrate how competitive the situation is. So that the students could plan early in order to avoid any inconvenience caused when they have nowhere to stay in the new semester, if they are not able to meet the requirement.