Humans of Kontinentalist: Qijin Tay

Qijin first joined as a web development intern before becoming a full-time member of Kontinentalist. We interviewed her twice, once in each role, and merged them to produce this article.

Qijin is now a Front-end Developer at Kontinentalist. She recently worked on our partnership story with Oxfam on how COVID-19 widened Asia’s wealth gap.

What is your background and how did you end up in your field and in Konti?

I did my undergraduate studies in Information Systems at SMU (Singapore Management University). It was a mix of business and computing, and the computing part was very wide-ranging and covered things like statistics, machine learning, data analytics, web development, and AI. We had a few majors like software development, which I majored in, business analytics, cyber security, digital business solutions, and so on.

At first, I wanted to do a business degree. But when I received my A-level results, I thought I couldn’t make it in. At that time, Information Systems wasn’t that popular in my school, so the admission requirements weren’t that high. So I thought of trying it since my eldest sister is also in this field and it looked very interesting — and I really fell in love with it! And to think of it, I don’t think I could have done well in business, because it’s too general, whereas I prefer more technical things where there are right and wrong answers. So I’m really glad that I landed here in this industry.