Humans of Orchan | Farrell Tan | The Story Continues

Humans of Orchan | Farrell Tan | The Story Continues

 

It has been a while since I've had to sit down and think about what I wanted to write about—that I had not written about already—on a topic so close to home. That topic being me, of course.  If you follow our blog and have read my previous post (which I wrote just shy of my 40th birthday), you'll know how I got my break in this industry. If not, you can check it out here: https://orchanpr.blogspot.com/2018/07/humans-of-orchan-farrell-tan.html. So I guess it's now time to talk about how I see myself in the next few years.

 

To be honest, I started charting my next steps beyond Orchan a few years back. I mean, don't get me wrong; Orchan will always be my first "baby", but I was toying around the idea of having another "child". The team will attest that I've run a number of ideas by them, and for some strange reason, nothing really stood out for me. I guess doing this for a living, you tend to have high expectations.

 

I have friends who are disrupting the status quo —(mostly) with tech—in some shape or form, mentors whom I still bounce ideas off with, and Clients who are ridiculously smart and innovative. But even then, surrounded by all this "intelligence" , nothing seemed to spark. I guess it's true that you can't force ideas into fruition; it has to come organically—sometimes, from the unlikeliest of places, in an area that you have little knowledge about.

 

I guess this is where I get to talk about our new "baby", The Third Degree.

 

I remember Craig talking about this concept—on and off—for a few years now. But running an agency, you sometimes don't get to catch a break where you get to sit down and ruminate. The lock-down last year gave me that opportunity. Don't me wrong; like many of you, I hated the idea of being cooped up. I especially hated the idea that a lot of the things that we were working on just stalled. But I choose to look at the silver lining; after all, it did give birth to our next chapter.

 

So what is The Third Degree about? The "proper" definition for it is that it is a resource and academic consulting platform supporting post-graduate research students, designed to enable on-demand access to relevant resources and experts, and give students further avenues for personal and professional growth and networking. My definition for it is that it is... "the ‘LinkedIn’ for emerging generations of academic researchers and tertiary students."

 

So what makes us different?

 

There are learning support agencies out there. Many aim at the mid-level of higher education; masters students learning the ropes. A few exist that focus on PhD level education, but these are individuals or small collectives with limited capacity. They provide guidance, or editing, or statistical analysis support, but not at a scalable range, and not necessarily covering the full student journey. 

 

There are also lots of free resources out there. Go to YouTube, view a few videos. But, anyone can post on YouTube. What we're doing is providing a community. A community of research students linked with a community of proven academics. Our contributors (videos, text, zoom consultations) are not only conveniently sourced and aggregated for client convenience, but they are vetted too in order to ensure credibility and reliability.

 

Our competitors offer advice, but they don't bring connectivity to other students, nor do they bring connectivity to peripheral community activities for research students as well— scholarship opportunities, post-doc and employment opportunities, field experts, and the like. They don't provide a holistic ecosystem for research students to raise their game and their outputs. We'd like to think that this is what makes us different.

 

We understand that at the end of the day, it's all about a community. We're creating a networked ecosystem for higher education, whilst at the same time contributing to the enhancement of postgraduate research outputs. Many see that as the responsibility of the university, but the reality is, continuous resource pressures means that for many, they fall short. 

 

We're still in the early days, and as with all things tech, we'll make small changes as we go along. But just like Orchan, we understand that change is a constant; and it is even more so within a tech-based environment. So right now, we're taking it one day at a time, but with the end goal in sight.

 

So how does a small town boy who has made a career out of "communicating" end up venturing into tech? Some might think it is gradual, but I think it's serendipity. And sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.