Journey of My Singapore Citizenship (Stage 2)

My youngest sister, who was the latest family member who applied for the citizenship, told me that her approval did not come even after 1.5 years. She applied via her spouse (which we have quite an opinion about) and her husband went to meet the MP (Member of Parliament) to enquire about the outcome. “After that, things moved very fast.”

So I thought I ought to do the same to expedite the application. I wrote in to the MP at the height of the Covid situation when meeting in person was out of the question. It was 8 months into my application. The reply from ICA was that an application usually takes 1 year to process.

So I waited. When May came this year, I got Coco to go to the Meet-the-People session to enquire about the outcome. This time, my in-principle approval came in during early June in the early hours through my SingPass app.

My elder and third sisters who had converted decades ago told me that they were invited to go to a session for half a day to do a mini tour of Singapore and listen to some talks about Singapore before taking the pledge. Obviously, my experience was not going to be the same. 

I was given 3 online tasks to complete:

1) Singapore Experiential Visit

2) Community Sharing Session

3) E-learning Journey

The first two tasks were completed in a jiffy through watching a video about living in Singapore and its community (including its belief in community projects) and filling up a survey with an open-ended question about why you want to be a citizen and what you appreciate Singapore about.

The third one was indeed an E-learning experience. It requires one to watch a series of videos divided into 7-stage. Each stage consists of about 7 to 10 short videos that last between 2 minutes and 6 minutes. After the video-watching at the end of each stage, there would be an MCQ quiz based on the videos. The passing mark is 8 out of 10. For the first quiz, I thought it must be chicken feed and didn’t take it seriously. I got a 7 and had to retake it! Lol! Subsequently, I paid more attention to the videos so that I could complete the task more quickly. 

For someone who had taught Social Studies, I actually learnt a few new things via the videos although I definitely had fewer things to learn compared with a “new” citizen. The videos are made succinct and use infographics to make the viewing more palatable.

After I submitted the last survey, I waited for the next letter which came a few days after.