HMS Award and Appreciation Day, held on 17 July 2010, was an event filled with merriment, with awardees celebrating their achievements with lecturers and schoolmates attending to show their support. 

Kicking off the event was a short inspirational video chosen by HMS Director, Mrs Choo Cheh-Hoon, on successful people who faced failures early in life. These include Thomas Edison who failed in school but invented the light bulb later in life and Albert Einstein who was not outstanding in school but became one of the most famous scientists.

Mrs Choo then shared about the importance of having to fail in order to live and succeed. Drawing from her personal experiences, Mrs Choo inspired the students to work hard and take risks despite the possibility of failure and put in hard work and determination in order to be successful and achieve our goals in life. Her speech was both motivational as well as stimulating and encouraged the students to assess their own successes and failures. Students from Business & Social Enterprise (BZSE), Child Psychology & Early Education (CPEE), Chinese Media & Communication (CMC), Chinese Studies (CHS), Early Childhood Education (ECH), and Psychology & Community Services (PCS) received awards for topping their cohorts to be in Directors’ list and scoring the best for their course modules. The HMS Society’s 2009 student committee also received tokens of appreciation for all their hard work in organising and carrying out events for HMS students in the past year. The event ended with a song signing performance by The Hearing Impaired Club. For Choo Wei Kim, a first year CPEE student who topped her cohort, her strategy or balancing school and social life paid off. She shared, “Setting priorities is the key. You can't study the whole day and ignore your social life. So prioritising is essential! I have a to-do-for-today list which I try to complete every single day. It's necessary to put in regular rather than last minute work.”

Diana Kaswadi, a Year 2 student who attended the event, was determined to work harder to receive an award on stage next year. “Perhaps the key to success is not just working hard, mugging and taking risks,” she said. Perhaps, the performance you put in and your attitude whilst working towards your goal might help too.” Reflecting on Mrs Choo’s speech, she declared, “Ngee Ann is only a small step, but the world out there is bigger!”