AS BUS 31 grinds to a halt outside ITE College East, a stream of students in maroon, blue or white shirts, alight and rush in just before the clock strikes eight.

It's a wet Monday at the college in Simei and a drizzle means longer lines at the electronic scanners, which students tap to mark their attendance.

ITE'S flagship College East receives an average of two official visits a week. Facilities include an amphitheatre, a billiard room and a swimming pool.

Opened in 2005, ITE College East is the first of three regional ITE campuses here. By 2011, two more - College West and Central - will be up.

College East has a student strength of about 8,000 - half the size of a polytechnic, but nearly five times larger than other ITE campuses.

Tan Yee Ling is 20 minutes late for her class in Material Planning. The 22-year-old, looking cheerful with her orange earrings, steps into the logistics operations lab and takes a green plastic chair.

Yee Ling, an Integrated Logistics Management student, doesn't get to sit down much: ITE courses are 70 per cent practical and 30 per cent theory. Exceptions are courses such as Electronics, where it is 40 per cent theory.

The logistics operations lab has been designed to help students make as seamless a transition from school to work as possible.

It looks like a warehouse. Besides conveyor belts, weighing and strapping machines, there are metal racks stacked to the ceiling with boxes.

Look down a glass window on the right of the room and you see two $40,000 Linde forklifts, a metal ramp and more metal racks with boxes.

Twenty-two ITE students have just become the first here to get their forklift licences while still in school. Ms Shirley Yue is teaching them the process of packing a BOM, or bill of materials.

'Shall we go through one round of the flow?' asks Ms Yue, who like most ITE lecturers, has years of industry experience. 'I need Orange and two others.'

Digital Animation students at work in a studio at ITE College Central (MacPherson).	Students in the Hospitality and Operations course practise housekeeping skills at the Clementi campus.

Yee Ling, or 'Orange' as she is known, gets up and stands at the end of a green conveyor belt, at Station C, for 'labelling and packing'. Two other girls take their places at kitting Stations A and B, where they put D-I-Y parts into plastic bags.

'At the end of the day, it will come to you in a pretty box,' says Ms Yue, looking smart in a white pant-suit.

Every 15 minutes or so, latecomers slip in quietly. One male student arrives near the end of the two-hour lesson at 9.50am. Nobody gets reprimanded.

Yee Ling's posse of girl pals, all petite and pretty with flowing locks, stretch their arms on the wooden lab table and grumble about being tired.

Three of the four girls work part-time, including Yee Ling, who had pulled a night shift at a Japanese restaurant the day before.

One in four ITE students holds down a job, and not all part-time ones.

Almost one in five students do not graduate, and the main reason is financial: their families need them to work.

Referring to the conveyor belt, one student asks Ms Yue: 'What if I do it halfway and it jams?'

Two sides of the story

IT'S now 10am. In a classroom on the third floor, Yee Ling and her pals Huifen, Tiffany and Shi Hui are humming the McDonald's jingle, 'I'm lovin' it', when Mr Aloysius Lim asks the class if they want to take part in a singing contest. It is for the college's School of Business Day on Nov 19.

Vanessa Lee does a pedicure for Ang Huizhen as part of training for their Beauty Therapy course.

'Wo men chang ge leh,' Yee Ling says in Mandarin, urging her friends to take part.

The fatherly Mr Lim has a Bachelor of Business Administration degree with 30 years' experience in shipping and logistics. He is the students' new class adviser - something like a form teacher.

He is conducting a weekly care session, a time for teachers to carry out administrative duties and also provide advice and support.

He tells the class that judges for the singing contest include Mrs Tan-Lim Lai Soon, director of the School of Business & Services.

An irrepressible student with a brown-dyed fringe and black-framed spectacles, pipes up in Hokkien: 'Who's Lai Soon?'

When the laughter dies down, Mr Lim looks around the room and asks if anyone has a problem they would like addressed.

When nobody answers, Mr Lim turns to the youth with the brown fringe and jokes that he will help him dye his hair.

Halfway through the session, two boys enter. One of them, Ivan, says to Mr Lim: 'Sorry, we are late.'

Yee Ling asks Ivan as he walks by: 'How's your O levels?'

Food and Beverage Operations students also help run the training restaurant at their Clementi campus.

Like many O-level students at the ITE, Ivan and Yee Ling had missed out on a polytechnic place when they did not do well in their exams. Ivan has retaken O-level Combined Science. Yee Ling sat for her O-level English - without success - in 2004.

A few from Yee Ling's class did well enough in the retake and left for the polytechnics.

There is a mix of O- and N-level students in the class. At the ITE, half of the students are from the Normal (Technical) course, slightly more than a quarter are O-level students and a fifth from Normal (Academic).

Mr Lim starts to tell them a story.

A blind boy puts up a sign which says, 'I'm blind. Please help me' along a street.

A stranger walking by changes the words on the sign and the boy's hat soon overflows with notes and coins.

What did he write?

Mr Lim gives the answer: 'Today is such a beautiful day and I can't see it.'

'Ohh, so sweet,' some students purr.

The young man with the brown fringe protests: 'I don't understand!'

The story shows the importance of creative communication, explains Mr Lim.

He then invites Azizah (not her real name) to share her story about a misunderstanding during an industrial attachment earlier this year.

A lecturer demonstrates how waxing is done at a class on Beauty Therapy.

One evening, when her supervisor asked her to work overtime, Azizah declined. The unhappy supervisor then yelled at Azizah and said she should do as told.

But it was not a case of Azizah having a bad work attitude.

What the supervisor did not know was that the teenager only had enough money for the MRT ride home. That night, her mother had to fetch her home in a taxi.

The moral of the story, Mr Lim says, is: Don't rush to judge.

'I always want to hear two sides of the story,' he assures his charges. 'I'm your new Class Adviser for this term, all of you are coming to me with a clean sheet of paper.'

Be Yourself

AT 11am, Yee Ling and friends shuffle off to another classroom, this time for a life skills class, where they learn things like resume-writing.

They plonk themselves down on plush blue office chairs, as Mr Ray Tan, a picture of bespectacled mildness, does a head count.

'There are supposed to be 35 in the class,' he mutters, counting only 20-something.

He is teaching Networking today. On a piece of mahjong paper on a stand, he writes 'Sincerity' and 'Be Yourself'.

He tells them he used to work as a financial adviser and would jot down details about people he had met on index cards.

When you make an effort to remember things like whether someone drives, or has children, the other party will be touched, he says.

But there is no need to suck up or be fake, he adds. If you like the Chelsea football club, for example, do not pretend to like Arsenal just to cosy up to someone who likes the latter.

Soon, it's noon and time for lunch. Yee Ling and gang troop down to an air-conditioned foodcourt called Food Haven, which is teeming with students.

Today she has brought a homemade cheese cake to share with her friends.

Nursing students get a feel of hospital operations with a dummy patient.

After lunch, it's back to class for a two-hour Cargo Documentation and Practices class in a classroom with clusters of black desktops.

It's a heavy-going session until it is finally 4pm, the end of the day.

At the end of the day, says ITE College East principal Tan Seng Hua, the school aims to tell students: 'You have a future, work for it.'

This message goes out to Huifen, shaking her head at how hard it is to digest what they have just learnt.

It goes out to Yee Ling who says coming to the ITE has made her 'stronger, more independent and able to think more for others'.

And it goes out to the boys with spiky hair waiting at the bus stop, the students poring over their homework at study tables and the rest of the students making their way out of the campus as the day draws to a close.

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