Opportunities abound for Sean Ao, after he gained first class honours at UMacau

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After finishing high school in Macau, Sean Ao thought he would go back to mainland China, where he was born, to attend university. At the time, Ao was not a strong English speaker, so his options for attending university in Macau had to factor in that challenge. But failing to get into his school of choice on the mainland, and instead receiving a place at the University of Macau (UMacau), his second choice, Ao was left with a decision or two to make.

“It’s the best university in Macau, so I was happy with the decision to stay here,” Ao says. “The teaching is all in English and that was interesting for me [as] I knew it was my weakness,” he says. “It [has] really helped [to] improve my language skills,” he added with confidence.

Ao completed his bachelor’s degree in computer and information science at the Faculty of Science and Technology in 2013 and life has been busy since, which he attributes to the nature and size of the Macau Special Administrative Region.

“Macau is small but it has developed fast. Once I started my degree here I thought I would also stay and work here,” he says. It meant that studying at UMacau had further advantages for Ao. “I could get a part time job and make contacts that way. I wanted to build my network, so staying in Macau was good for me, and now I have a strong network.” He speaks of both the advantages of attending a large university known as the best in its city and of living in a small city where networks constantly cross over.

As a top grade student, Ao was a member of Honours College, which pools together the best students from various disciplines and grooms them with special academic support to help them achieve their full potential and broaden their learning experiences. With that support, Ao had the opportunity to do an overseas exchange, which was the highlight of his bachelor’s degree. “I got the chance to go to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), so I really got to learn about American and Western culture. It helped me to develop good leadership skills, too,” he says.

But it wasn’t all easy. While studying at UMacau means a lot of group projects, Ao found that at UIUC everything was done individually and he found the course quite tough and demanding. But he was equipped with some strong lessons from UMacau. “They can’t teach every technical skill but they do teach you how to find solutions – which means locating the problem. That is a really important lesson for me.”

Now, Ao is busier than ever. After graduating, he applied for both full-time jobs and a master’s degree at UMacau, thinking he would take whichever one was offered to him. Of course, he was offered both and now works full time for an engineering company on websites and other IT solutions, as well as studying part time at UMacau.

And that’s not all. Ao has also found time in the last 18 months to start his own business, offering IT support to small and medium-sized enterprises in Macau. “The market here is good for me, I am quite busy,” he says. “I have three people working for me and when I finish my master’s, I want to start developing products that we can sell to clients.”

Travelling around the US during the exchange programme gave him a touch of wanderlust and, with so much going on, Ao’s only regret is not travelling more before he started work.

Reminiscing, he says, “The bachelor’s was more fun – I was at university a lot more than I am now!”