Read a summary of this article on FAST.
FAST
SINGAPORE: When Tsuri Xie first began posting videos of her car-wrapping work on TikTok, she met with a stream of comments from drivers insisting that they would “never let a girl touch (their) car”.
It is a familiar refrain in an industry that has long had a masculine image.
Yet, this is where the 36-year-old is determined to stake her claim as a vinyl car wrapper. “How I manage a muscle ache (is to) just grind and work through it,” she said.
“If we accidentally poke ourselves with the penknife or scald ourselves with the heat gun, it’s just another day. … Spray some alcohol on it and then just get back to work.”
What was once the cause of scepticism has now become part of her appeal.
Tsuri Xie discovered a passion for vinyl car-wrapping. (File photo: CNA TODAY/Nuria Ling)
“After realising that she’s one of the only female wrappers … in Singapore, (I was) attracted (to that),” said a female client who had done some research on TikTok and Instagram to find out companies that did car-wrapping. “She’s very cool.”
The craft itself is highly technical. Every car, Xie learnt, demands a different approach, such as “which way to stretch the material”, and precision.
None of this was what she expected to end up doing after graduating with a degree in design communication. She spent four years in marketing, running campaigns and social accounts — a job she took out of convenience rather than passion.
But corporate life soon wore her down. “When it comes to climbing the corporate ladder, there are a lot of factors that I can’t control, … (like) office politics,” she cited.
“I started to (ask myself) why, every morning, I had to commute to work (and do) something that I didn’t want to do.”
Xie installing a vinyl sheet on a Ferrari sports car. (File photo: CNA TODAY/Nuria Ling)
So she quit. Her decision to abandon a stable career path had even her entrepreneur husband worried about the loss of steady income and what would happen if his ventures faltered.
One of those eventual ventures, however, was the business Xie also joined: Vos Automotive Styling. “Compared to a corporate job, I like (almost) everything about this job. It can be very tiring, but it’s a lot more fulfilling,” she beamed.
On not doing a job related to her degree, she said: “It’s a very expensive piece of paper … (but) I wouldn’t say it’s useless.”
She is among those degree holders who have stepped away from trajectories their qualifications often dictate.
From business graduates who now fillet fish or wield barber tools to graduates in health science and linguistics who have embraced new professions, they are discovering that the road less travelled can sometimes lead to where they need to be.
WATCH: This female vinyl car wrapper quit corporate marketing to “stick stickers on cars” (9:49)
The programme, On The Red Dot — in its series Graduated, Now What? — explores how they have arrived at where they are today and how they grapple with the question of whether their education has been wasted.
In contrast to Xie, Dave Peter Ho took an unlikely career path not because he was exiting the corporate sector but because he was unable to break into it.
He spent nine months through his final semester at Nanyang Technology University — where he specialised in business analytics — sending out applications and hoping to “find a corporate job” with a stable income.
The 27-year-old applied for more than 100 roles — in graduate programmes, corporate sales, procurement, business development, account management — and made it deep into interview rounds but never across the finish line.
Dave Peter Ho felt “ghosted” when his job interviews came to naught.
Desperation pushed him to explore TikTok’s free training programme for aspiring livestreamers, a suggestion from his mother. His first stream earned him S$200 (US$155) in two hours; within two months, he was fully committed to livestreaming.
“The decision to stop applying for full-time jobs stemmed from me wanting to try (livestreaming) out 110 per cent, even though I knew that there was a chance that it wouldn’t work out,” he said.
He now streams nearly 70 times a month, working towards the income level of the most prestigious corporate jobs he had targeted. Achieving it, however, would mean seven-day weeks, up to four streams a day and “working like a dog”.
His efforts have not gone unnoticed. TikTok’s Creator Partnership team considers him one of its more prominent live hosts and uses him as a benchmark for new streamers.
WATCH: Unemployed graduate to top TikTok livestreamer — I was rejected from 100-plus jobs (11:42)
It is a similar story of redirection for Nicholas Fheng, who faced “rejection after rejection” when applying for 20 to 30 jobs following a break from his sales and business development role at a technology firm.
He took it as a sign to pursue barbering — a side hustle he had started while studying business at the Singapore Management University (SMU) — as a career.
His barber shop, Nbrhood, is a home business, with working days that stretch from 8am to 10.45pm. “At the end of the day, (I’m) very, very spent,” he said. “My legs are aching. My back is aching.”
The 30-year-old did not, however, grow up wanting to be a barber.
“I was always sold the idea that a successful career would mean being a doctor, a lawyer or even an architect,” he said. “And coming from a university like SMU, most of my peers would naturally follow such professions.”
Nicholas Fheng in his home barber shop, which is open seven days a week.
Still, his earnings mirror his previous corporate salary, averaging about S$5,000 a month, though they can fluctuate between S$3,000 in a quiet month and up to S$6,000, for example during the Chinese New Year period.
His mother, Magdeline Chin, who paid for his university education, often finds herself fielding comments about the “return on investment”. “There are lot of sacrifices on his part in terms of how people view him,” she said.
Fheng, too, has niggling doubts. He has browsed LinkedIn “a few times”, contemplating a return to a white-collar job.
“Sometimes in the short term, it’s tough. But in the long term, I believe that one day it’ll pay off,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a value in just persevering.”
WATCH: Business student to home barber — My DIY barber shop journey (10:33)
The feeling of doubt is something Rae Zhang, 34, understood well when her work and her interests were no longer aligned.
A nutrition and dietetics graduate and scholarship holder, she started to see the hollowness of her role in setting up nutrition services in the community when she rarely knew if her advice made any difference once patients returned home.
Shortly after quitting her hospital job, she began tidying her room. “The whole space felt completely transformed. And I felt so much better. Then I thought, could this be turned into a job?” she recalled.
She went on to co-found Orderly, a professional organising service for homes and workspaces, and later appeared on Channel 8’s home-transformation programme, House Everything?
Orderly’s co-founders, Rae Zhang (right, photo on the left) and Vanessa Yip (left, photo on the left), in action. (File photos: Orderly)
Her job may look serene during the final reveal of each decluttered space, but the work behind it is anything but.
The strain has caught up with her more than once, leaving her with a back sprain, knotted muscles and even a bout of hives once. Yet the exhaustion is matched by fulfilment.
“Whenever I receive positive feedback, … I feel I’ve helped the client improve their lives in one way or another. There’s also a very clear physical transformation that everybody can witness,” she said. “This is why I love my job.”
Her parents were initially concerned about her family’s finances, especially as Zhang has two young children to support. But the career change has given her the flexibility to balance work with motherhood.
Her parents have since come round to it. “I don’t think her degree in dietetics will go to waste,” her mother said. Her father added: “If it doesn’t work out, (she) can always return to healthcare”.
WATCH: First-class honours to home organiser — Why I left my stable corporate job (12:28)
Other degree holders may find themselves pulled from the careers they once imagined, drawn instead into their family businesses — whether out of duty or by circumstance.
For Cordillia Tan, who was once convinced she would be a “corporate girly” for life, the switch was deliberate. She left her job at a blockchain accelerator to rescue Pitstop Tyres, the workshop her father had built over 12 years.
What she walked into was grimmer than she expected. The business was in a “very bad financial situation”, weighed down by almost half a million dollars of debt.
“Never in my wildest dreams (did) I think you could owe somebody so much money,” she said.
To save the business, she emptied her savings account and took out personal and credit card loans just to pay for tyres. Only after turning to TikTok — the only marketing she could afford — did the business begin to revive.
Cordillia Tan removing a tyre from a car.
Revenue grew, debts slowly shrank and her father eventually retired, leaving her to run the operations. Today, she manages the workshop like “an octopus”, switching from tyre mechanic to customer service to inventory checker, depending on the day’s demands.
It is a departure from the norm for an English Language graduate. Some customers are stunned to learn that she is an NUS graduate — she was on the dean’s list too — and even question why she “wasted” her parents’ money.
She understands the sentiment when a mechanic’s starting salary in Singapore is “only a thousand-plus (dollars)”. She said: “Can you tell any uni grad to … take S$1,000-plus (in salary)? There’s no way.”
Still, she has no regrets. Besides, returning to corporate life is neither practical nor desirable when she has borrowed tens of thousands of dollars in her name. “I don’t think I have a choice but to move forward,” she said.
WATCH: NUS graduate to tyre mechanic — “You wasted your parents’ money!” (11:48)
Fishmonger Baron Ang also knows the weight of public perception. The tourism management graduate has received comments about why a degree holder would end up in what some people describe as a “dirty job”.
The 34-year-old had stints in the government sector and then as a regional manager in the Philippines. But when the pandemic struck, his overseas job in food and beverage vanished as the business was being sold.
He returned home just as his father’s stall at Chong Pang Wet Market needed workers. What he thought would be a temporary stint stretched into years along with the pandemic.
Slowly the work pulled him in, and his interest in the trade grew. He took pride in handling seafood and enjoyed engaging with long-time customers even as the work demanded 14- to 15-hour days, with unpredictable income.
WATCH: Millennial fishmonger speaks many languages, has a tourism management degree (10:51)
The stall, Panjang Ikan, has been in the family for three generations, starting with his grandfather and spanning more than two decades.
Whenever Ang considers switching jobs, there will be loyal customers who remind him of the responsibility he carries — as some of them insist on buying seafood only from him.
“If I’m able to build … this business (into) a brand,” he said, “that’ll be an even … better thing that I’d look forward to.”
Watch the On The Red Dot series Graduated, Now What? The programme airs on Channel 5 every Friday at 9.30pm.
Source: CNA/dp
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FAST
SINGAPORE: When Tsuri Xie first began posting videos of her car-wrapping work on TikTok, she met with a stream of comments from drivers insisting that they would “never let a girl touch (their) car”.
It is a familiar refrain in an industry that has long had a masculine image.
Yet, this is where the 36-year-old is determined to stake her claim as a vinyl car wrapper. “How I manage a muscle ache (is to) just grind and work through it,” she said.
“If we accidentally poke ourselves with the penknife or scald ourselves with the heat gun, it’s just another day. … Spray some alcohol on it and then just get back to work.”
What was once the cause of scepticism has now become part of her appeal.
Tsuri Xie discovered a passion for vinyl car-wrapping. (File photo: CNA TODAY/Nuria Ling)
“After realising that she’s one of the only female wrappers … in Singapore, (I was) attracted (to that),” said a female client who had done some research on TikTok and Instagram to find out companies that did car-wrapping. “She’s very cool.”
The craft itself is highly technical. Every car, Xie learnt, demands a different approach, such as “which way to stretch the material”, and precision.
None of this was what she expected to end up doing after graduating with a degree in design communication. She spent four years in marketing, running campaigns and social accounts — a job she took out of convenience rather than passion.
But corporate life soon wore her down. “When it comes to climbing the corporate ladder, there are a lot of factors that I can’t control, … (like) office politics,” she cited.
“I started to (ask myself) why, every morning, I had to commute to work (and do) something that I didn’t want to do.”
Xie installing a vinyl sheet on a Ferrari sports car. (File photo: CNA TODAY/Nuria Ling)
So she quit. Her decision to abandon a stable career path had even her entrepreneur husband worried about the loss of steady income and what would happen if his ventures faltered.
One of those eventual ventures, however, was the business Xie also joined: Vos Automotive Styling. “Compared to a corporate job, I like (almost) everything about this job. It can be very tiring, but it’s a lot more fulfilling,” she beamed.
On not doing a job related to her degree, she said: “It’s a very expensive piece of paper … (but) I wouldn’t say it’s useless.”
She is among those degree holders who have stepped away from trajectories their qualifications often dictate.
From business graduates who now fillet fish or wield barber tools to graduates in health science and linguistics who have embraced new professions, they are discovering that the road less travelled can sometimes lead to where they need to be.
WATCH: This female vinyl car wrapper quit corporate marketing to “stick stickers on cars” (9:49)
The programme, On The Red Dot — in its series Graduated, Now What? — explores how they have arrived at where they are today and how they grapple with the question of whether their education has been wasted.
WHEN THE JOB HUNT GOES NOWHERE
In contrast to Xie, Dave Peter Ho took an unlikely career path not because he was exiting the corporate sector but because he was unable to break into it.
He spent nine months through his final semester at Nanyang Technology University — where he specialised in business analytics — sending out applications and hoping to “find a corporate job” with a stable income.
The 27-year-old applied for more than 100 roles — in graduate programmes, corporate sales, procurement, business development, account management — and made it deep into interview rounds but never across the finish line.
Dave Peter Ho felt “ghosted” when his job interviews came to naught.
Desperation pushed him to explore TikTok’s free training programme for aspiring livestreamers, a suggestion from his mother. His first stream earned him S$200 (US$155) in two hours; within two months, he was fully committed to livestreaming.
“The decision to stop applying for full-time jobs stemmed from me wanting to try (livestreaming) out 110 per cent, even though I knew that there was a chance that it wouldn’t work out,” he said.
He now streams nearly 70 times a month, working towards the income level of the most prestigious corporate jobs he had targeted. Achieving it, however, would mean seven-day weeks, up to four streams a day and “working like a dog”.
His efforts have not gone unnoticed. TikTok’s Creator Partnership team considers him one of its more prominent live hosts and uses him as a benchmark for new streamers.
WATCH: Unemployed graduate to top TikTok livestreamer — I was rejected from 100-plus jobs (11:42)
It is a similar story of redirection for Nicholas Fheng, who faced “rejection after rejection” when applying for 20 to 30 jobs following a break from his sales and business development role at a technology firm.
He took it as a sign to pursue barbering — a side hustle he had started while studying business at the Singapore Management University (SMU) — as a career.
His barber shop, Nbrhood, is a home business, with working days that stretch from 8am to 10.45pm. “At the end of the day, (I’m) very, very spent,” he said. “My legs are aching. My back is aching.”
The 30-year-old did not, however, grow up wanting to be a barber.
“I was always sold the idea that a successful career would mean being a doctor, a lawyer or even an architect,” he said. “And coming from a university like SMU, most of my peers would naturally follow such professions.”
Nicholas Fheng in his home barber shop, which is open seven days a week.
Still, his earnings mirror his previous corporate salary, averaging about S$5,000 a month, though they can fluctuate between S$3,000 in a quiet month and up to S$6,000, for example during the Chinese New Year period.
His mother, Magdeline Chin, who paid for his university education, often finds herself fielding comments about the “return on investment”. “There are lot of sacrifices on his part in terms of how people view him,” she said.
Fheng, too, has niggling doubts. He has browsed LinkedIn “a few times”, contemplating a return to a white-collar job.
“Sometimes in the short term, it’s tough. But in the long term, I believe that one day it’ll pay off,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a value in just persevering.”
WATCH: Business student to home barber — My DIY barber shop journey (10:33)
WHEN WORK STOPS FEELING MEANINGFUL
The feeling of doubt is something Rae Zhang, 34, understood well when her work and her interests were no longer aligned.
A nutrition and dietetics graduate and scholarship holder, she started to see the hollowness of her role in setting up nutrition services in the community when she rarely knew if her advice made any difference once patients returned home.
Shortly after quitting her hospital job, she began tidying her room. “The whole space felt completely transformed. And I felt so much better. Then I thought, could this be turned into a job?” she recalled.
She went on to co-found Orderly, a professional organising service for homes and workspaces, and later appeared on Channel 8’s home-transformation programme, House Everything?
Orderly’s co-founders, Rae Zhang (right, photo on the left) and Vanessa Yip (left, photo on the left), in action. (File photos: Orderly)
Her job may look serene during the final reveal of each decluttered space, but the work behind it is anything but.
The strain has caught up with her more than once, leaving her with a back sprain, knotted muscles and even a bout of hives once. Yet the exhaustion is matched by fulfilment.
“Whenever I receive positive feedback, … I feel I’ve helped the client improve their lives in one way or another. There’s also a very clear physical transformation that everybody can witness,” she said. “This is why I love my job.”
Her parents were initially concerned about her family’s finances, especially as Zhang has two young children to support. But the career change has given her the flexibility to balance work with motherhood.
Her parents have since come round to it. “I don’t think her degree in dietetics will go to waste,” her mother said. Her father added: “If it doesn’t work out, (she) can always return to healthcare”.
WATCH: First-class honours to home organiser — Why I left my stable corporate job (12:28)
WHEN FAMILY NEEDS YOU
Other degree holders may find themselves pulled from the careers they once imagined, drawn instead into their family businesses — whether out of duty or by circumstance.
For Cordillia Tan, who was once convinced she would be a “corporate girly” for life, the switch was deliberate. She left her job at a blockchain accelerator to rescue Pitstop Tyres, the workshop her father had built over 12 years.
What she walked into was grimmer than she expected. The business was in a “very bad financial situation”, weighed down by almost half a million dollars of debt.
“Never in my wildest dreams (did) I think you could owe somebody so much money,” she said.
To save the business, she emptied her savings account and took out personal and credit card loans just to pay for tyres. Only after turning to TikTok — the only marketing she could afford — did the business begin to revive.
Cordillia Tan removing a tyre from a car.
Revenue grew, debts slowly shrank and her father eventually retired, leaving her to run the operations. Today, she manages the workshop like “an octopus”, switching from tyre mechanic to customer service to inventory checker, depending on the day’s demands.
It is a departure from the norm for an English Language graduate. Some customers are stunned to learn that she is an NUS graduate — she was on the dean’s list too — and even question why she “wasted” her parents’ money.
She understands the sentiment when a mechanic’s starting salary in Singapore is “only a thousand-plus (dollars)”. She said: “Can you tell any uni grad to … take S$1,000-plus (in salary)? There’s no way.”
Still, she has no regrets. Besides, returning to corporate life is neither practical nor desirable when she has borrowed tens of thousands of dollars in her name. “I don’t think I have a choice but to move forward,” she said.
WATCH: NUS graduate to tyre mechanic — “You wasted your parents’ money!” (11:48)
Fishmonger Baron Ang also knows the weight of public perception. The tourism management graduate has received comments about why a degree holder would end up in what some people describe as a “dirty job”.
The 34-year-old had stints in the government sector and then as a regional manager in the Philippines. But when the pandemic struck, his overseas job in food and beverage vanished as the business was being sold.
He returned home just as his father’s stall at Chong Pang Wet Market needed workers. What he thought would be a temporary stint stretched into years along with the pandemic.
Slowly the work pulled him in, and his interest in the trade grew. He took pride in handling seafood and enjoyed engaging with long-time customers even as the work demanded 14- to 15-hour days, with unpredictable income.
WATCH: Millennial fishmonger speaks many languages, has a tourism management degree (10:51)
The stall, Panjang Ikan, has been in the family for three generations, starting with his grandfather and spanning more than two decades.
Whenever Ang considers switching jobs, there will be loyal customers who remind him of the responsibility he carries — as some of them insist on buying seafood only from him.
“If I’m able to build … this business (into) a brand,” he said, “that’ll be an even … better thing that I’d look forward to.”
Watch the On The Red Dot series Graduated, Now What? The programme airs on Channel 5 every Friday at 9.30pm.
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Source: CNA/dp
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CNA's best current affairs documentaries with a deeper look at issues affecting Asia, sent to your inbox weekly.
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