SINGAPORE - The move to Punggol Digital District gives the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) the opportunity to be part of its larger community and be integrated with industry, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing said on Monday. 

“We spend a few years designing and shaping a building. Then the building will spend the next few decades shaping us,” he said, quoting a speech by former British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1943.

Mr Chan, who was speaking at SIT’s topping-out ceremony at its Punggol site, said his first wish was for SIT to remain agile and integrated with its community and industry.

“I am very happy to see that it has adhered to the basic philosophy of how we want this building to be integrated with the rest of the community, with the industry, and also to allow the cross-pollination of ideas across different disciplines and different sectors,” he said.

“The building is situated in the heart of Punggol. It will become a central part of the Punggol Digital District,” he added.

The SIT campus is about two-thirds completed and is expected to be operational by the second half of 2024.

Mr Chan noted that SIT has also designed its spaces to be reconfigurable and agile. “We cannot anticipate today what the needs will be in the next decade, or even in the next few decades.”

His second wish was that SIT does not forgo its existing linkages with the polytechnics as it moves into its own campus.

“This is what makes SIT stand out as a university that is fully connected to all polytechnics and other institutions beyond SIT,” he said.

Mr Chan said his third hope was that SIT would extend its offerings to more postgraduate students than undergraduates, and be a “catalyst” for adult learning.

“While we can prepare a cohort of 40,000 students to graduate from university every year, we need to retrain 400,000 to 500,000 adult learners to be current and relevant to market needs,” he said. “I hope that SIT can take in a good proportion of these adult learners.”

He added: “If we can do that, SIT will not just be an institute of higher learning, but it will be an institute of continuous learning – reaching out to the people in the community, to the industry, to the polytechnics and the Institute of Technical Education. This will become a focal point in our adult learning.”