Assignments and new friends abound in Dennis Chew's first month of school
The DJ and actor shared that although his workload has increased, his peers have become a source of energy.
Dennis Chew with one of his classmates. (Photo: Instagram/@denniszhouchongqing)
To say Dennis Chew is busy would be an understatement. Along with hosting Love 972’s morning radio show The Breakfast Quartet every weekday, the 48-year-old is also a first-year student in the Chinese Media & Communication programme at Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
In an interview with 8days.sg – which he could only do on a Friday evening, as that was all the free time he had – Chew spoke of how pressure from schoolwork was already mounting, despite having started his full time studies just under a month ago.
When speaking of his workload, he told the entertainment portal how “assignments and projects are kicking in now” with three papers to write and a submission of at least 40 photos for a visual communications module.
Although the DJ and actor will be exempted from taking modules in radio production and presentation (with good reason), his diploma programme will still take three years to complete. Not that he’s complaining though – he understands that he must learn about “other stuff that [he’s] not very familiar with”.
Asked about his third-year internship – a compulsory experience for Ngee Ann Polytechnic students – Chew joked that he would “return to radio for that... but it’ll depend on whether they’ll accept me”.
His schedule between working and studying full-time sounds exhausting, but Chew shared his secret source of energy: Not caffeine, but his classmates. He said they “are really cute, once I see them, I'll feel happy”, showing how quickly he was able to bond with them despite their sizable age gap.
He has even offered to send his classmates back home, and sometimes drop them off on campus, whenever he is able to. While Chew himself doesn’t drive, he enlists the help of a close family friend to do so. He said: "It happened that I found out that there was a classmate who lives quite close to me, so I offered to ferry her to and from school, [and it continued from there].”
All we can say is: We would’ve loved to have had an older and interesting classmate like Chew to learn and get support from during our school days, too.
