How To Adult is the ultimate guidebook for all Singaporeans struggling with adulting.
An ambitious brainchild of a group of local university students, the online platform addresses all the ins-and-outs of being an adult in Singapore through cheeky and informative articles and videos.
Geared towards an audience transitioning from student life to working life or those in their early years of work, How To Adult’s website contains guides across the sectors of Home, Life, Career and Finance. From tips for acing an interview to steps for attaining financial security, they’ve got your back.
For instance, one of their first and most widely-shared posts is a guide to BTO that contains all the essential information a first-timer needs, from options and costs to grants and loans.
There are even guides for matters you’d prefer not admitting to being clueless about, like knowing how to pick the right fruits and how not to mess up your laundry.
Written By Young Adults, For Young Adults
The guides are most beneficial for young working adults aged 21 – 27 with less than three years of working experience, the group shared.
These people have the most difficult time during the transition from being a full-time student to being a working adult. Their biggest concern is the uncertain future and they worry about the set of responsibilities that adulthood brings.
To pander to their target audience’s psyche, the group injects elements of humour into their content and uses bright splashes of colours to allow their posts to jump out at their audience. The result is quality content that is equal parts educational and funny.
Also, the group did not simply spin a roulette wheel to decide on which topics to tackle.
Rather, the issues were picked after a pre-campaign study amongst 300 respondents to identify pressing subjects they were keen on finding out more about.
Though the members are young adults too, How To Adult is not a case of the blind leading the blind.
The team sources for information across the web but also seeks information and opinions from experts in the field and even government boards. Content is also repurposed from their partners like Seedly and 99.co from time to time.
Behind How To Adult
How To Adult is actually a social campaign proposed by a group of four undergraduates who initially planned to run it for four months, till end April 2018.
The platform was created after the team realised that snippets of information are littered all over the Internet with no single, comprehensive document that collates everything together. Also, information from official websites tend to be jargon-heavy, which deters readers, explained 23-year-old Nazurah.
Thus, How To Adult pares down information to the bare essentials, strips away unnecessary technical terms and presents it in an simple, yet engaging manner.
But now, the team of four who are all in their final year at NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and Information, are contemplating running the campaign long term.
“It’s very gratifying to hear people saying ‘your campaign is really useful’,” shared Cheryl, who manages content creation and PR for the group.
“Running The Campaign Is Essentially Running A Start-Up”
While the platform looks visually on point and is backed by great content, and the group always look like they’ve got their act together, the team admitted that it’s incredibly hectic behind the scenes. This is especially since the group has to run the campaign while juggling school and other responsibilities.
Essentially, the amount of work that goes into How To Adult is equivalent to running a start-up, Cheryl shared. “To me, this project is not just a FYP campaign. From the beginning, it already felt like a start-up,” the 22-year-old explained.
From planning topics, sourcing for sponsors, liaising with organisations, producing videos and articles, sourcing for event venues and inviting speakers, it has been a brow-furrowing experience for the team.
As she succinctly summarised, “everything you have to bao ga liao, you have to do everything yourself.”
In Bed With & Fire Side Chats
In addition to posting online guides, the How To Adult team also organises a series of talks by thought leaders in various industries who will share their tips and answer queries of participants.
Participants can attend such events to hear from those who are coping pretty well with adulting. Also, certain issues like networking won’t come across as effectively in written form and that’s when these events come in handy.
To get a sense of what each event entails, you can refer to the post-event summaries that the team shares on their website.
Final Advice
Finally, I asked the team to share a piece of advice for someone who’s making the transition from schooling to working and is totally clueless.
“Follow How To Adult,” Cheryl quipped with a cheerful laugh.
“Ok, other than that, I think it’s about taking your time to figure it out. There’s no point being so worried about how your future is going to turn out when the worry might just hinder you for all you know,” she added.
As for Nazurah, she shared that: “My advice would be to ask. By asking, you will learn from different sources. It might get confusing but at least you’ll have options.”
“And follow How to Adult, correct!”
How To Adult: Website | Facebook
Author
Get the latest updates by following us on Twitter @hypeandstuff & Facebook Have an interesting story to share? Email us at [email protected]