Tech, AI, and Career Pivots: Prof. Sun Sun Lim’s Path to Success

Is technology bridging gaps or distancing us from one another? Join us in a conversation with Professor Sun Sun Lim, a researcher in the world of tech and AI. Explore the secrets of her successful career and discover how she reinvented herself along the way. Dive into the dynamic world of technology, where she shares her insights on the power of male allies in women’s leadership and making a lasting impact on society. Tune in now!

Discussion Topics: Tech, AI, and Career Pivots

• Who is Prof. Sun Sun Lim?
• Did digitalisation disconnect us from each other?
• Raising children in the digital age
• Proving yourself as a lowly assistant professor
• How to balance work and personal life as a woman leader
• How to create visibility for yourself
• Are women taking more risks now?
• Pivotal moment in Lim’s career
• Closing

Transcript: Tech, AI, and Career Pivots

Ritu G. Mehrish: Welcome Professor Lim on the ‘Rewrite The Rules‘ podcast. It’s such a pleasure to have you on our podcast and today I’m sure our listeners are in for a treat. And before we start the conversation, I want to just do a very short introduction and then I’m gonna ask you to tell us a little bit more about your journey. So Professor Lim is Vice President of Partnerships and engagement at Singapore Management University. Also called SMU in this part of the world. She’s also a professor of communication and technology at its College of Integrative Studies. So welcome professor Lim once again to the show. Professor, it’ll be great if you could start by telling us a little bit about your current role and a little bit about your journey.

Who is Prof. Sun Sun Lim?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: So I’m currently Vice President partnerships and engagement at SMU, and I look after four officers. The first is industry engagement, which is essentially about building relationships with industry partners, and then I also manage innovation and entrepreneurship. So that’s where we try to incubate, for example, startups. And we built the startup ecosystem in Singapore at the same time. I also oversee international relations, which relates to our relationships with partner universities. And finally, I am also in charge of the Office of overseas centres because SMU is opening overseas centres in Assam and possibly beyond.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Wow, that sounds like a lot going on. Professor Lim, did you always want to do what you’re doing today?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: Yes, pretty much I think from the moment I embarked upon graduate school, I knew that I wanted to be deeply immersed in understanding the impact of different kinds of technological trends on society. Whether it was from a practitioner’s perspective or from an academic perspective, I could actually see that technological transformation was unfolding and I very much wanted to help appreciate it as well as see how it could be well applied.

Ritu G. Mehrish: And so then after, as you said, after you graduated, did you get into teaching straight away or what’s been your journey like?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: So it’s quite interesting because when I first embarked on my masters, I decided to do media and communication because the internet was exploding. And that was when I undertook my. PhD research also on online behaviour.

So when I returned from London to Singapore on 02-03, I felt that I had returned to a country that was quite different because when I looked around me in the food court, in public places, people were using mobile phones. Broadband internet was also exploding in the home, and people were going online a lot more.

And I wondered to myself, how is this actually changing people’s lived existence? How is this influencing people’s domestic interactions at home, and workplace interactions? And when I looked at the academic community in Singapore, and people who were doing this kind of research, I think I could probably count on one hand the number of people at that time and I thought, wow, someone needs to be looking at this and it might as well be me. So that’s how I really embarked on a very long and productive journey of understanding how technological changes have impacted society.

Ritu G. Mehrish: All right. I’m interested, what were some of your, maybe top two, or three findings? Were there any surprises?

Did digitalisation disconnect us from each other?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: I think when I returned because there were so many shifts in society, there was a great deal of concern and the usual moral panic. Members of the public thought that people would become more disconnected from each other and that our children would stop talking to their parents.

And that’s where together with my students, we embarked on research on technology use in households. And I remember there was a particular piece of research we did with elderly parents and their adult children. It was fascinating because even at that time when people were primarily using the Nokia feature phones could see that actually in many ways it facilitated interactions within the home because people could actually keep in touch with each other throughout the day. 

And at the same time when the parents were struggling with these devices, their kids would step in and teach them. And this actually opened the door towards greater interactions and knowledge sharing. So that was one of the surprise findings

Similarly, I went to extend my research to countries like Korea because at that time Korea was the most technologically advanced. It was really an interesting sort of Insight into the future of technology at the time. It was interesting how technology helped to in many ways improve family relations. For example, there was a father who had mistakenly accused his daughter of having a boyfriend, which he discouraged.

And then when his wife was trying to hint to him that he should apologise to make amends he actually was quite reluctant. But she then used her. A mobile phone to text him to say that, you should apologise. And under the pretext of being drunk when he came home one day, he then apologised to the daughter, and I thought the mother’s use of the SMS to hinge to the husband or to remind him to apologise to the daughter was actually a very clever way.

Of not disturbing the sort of hierarchical relationship within the household, and yet still being able to get the message across. On the one hand, you’ve got cultural norms. On the other hand, you’ve got very innovative and creative ways of using technology that can be advantageous.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Professor Lim, I saw you also authored a book. Tell us a little bit about the book.

Raising children in the digital age

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: So this is transcendent parenting, raising children in the digital age and essentially when I think back to my own journey as a parent my daughter was born in ‘03, my son in ‘06, and iPhone was born in ‘07. Just the three years between my two children’s births and as a young parent getting used to parenting obligations, it was fascinating for me how the emergence of smartphones and the growing intensification of mobile communication really raised the parenting stakes in many ways.

When I think about my son entering kindergarten compared to my daughter, there was suddenly an explosion of parenting chat groups on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, and it created all kinds of interesting opportunities for parents of children in the same school or in the same class to interact with each other.

But it also created all kinds of friction where parents. We confronted each other if their children had certain altercations in the school playground or if there were certain issues that the kids were having differences over. And this, to me, was actually rather unhealthy. Because you don’t allow the children to have agency or to develop that sense of independence or autonomy in managing their own social interactions.

But principally my book, Transcendent Parenting really dealt with that broader conversation around what I felt was. Parents are being forced to transcend their personal lives and their parenting lives. So it didn’t matter whether their children were by their site or out of site, they always had to parent.

So even when they were in the office and they were doing their work, they were getting notifications from teachers, and notifications from other parents about what their kids were up to, and they had to parent constantly.

Ritu G. Mehrish: I was nodding because I could relate to everything you said. I have two young kids myself, and I was like, sometimes those WhatsApp chats and sometimes those notifications are not the best thing, but sometimes they are the best thing, right? Professor Lim, I’m gonna shift gears a little bit and I wanna talk about you as a woman leader. During this long journey that you’ve had, what have been some of your challenges?

Proving yourself as a lowly assistant professor

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: So I would say that whole, so with academia, it’s actually quite challenging in the very first part of your career because the first six years is when as a lowly assistant professor, you really have to prove yourself. You’ve got to prove that you have a lot to contribute to the academic community, that you’ve got research that is going to stand the test of time, and that you’ve got scholarly potential, not just in terms of research or in terms of mentoring students, but also in terms of helping to lead the academic community in the latter part of your career.

My tenure years therefore coincided with the period when I had my two children at the same time, of course I was very blessed to also have an academic husband and he is slightly ahead of me in his career.

So he had, by the time I was halfway through tenure, he had himself obtained tenure, so he could help me by stepping up a lot more in terms of the childminding. But there was that difficulty. Making sure that I was active in the broader academic community, and I don’t just mean in Singapore because, for academia, our research really can potentially have global implications.

So making sure that we go to international conferences, making sure that we are interacting with our international peers, making sure that our research is known across the broader international academic community is. Something that’s very important and when I had two young kids between being pregnant, nursing and getting them ready for school and so on, there was just very little opportunity to go to North America or Europe or Asia.

To do the long conference trips to make yourself really visible in the academic circuit. So that part of it was really quite challenging. What was actually quite helpful was the emergence of social media because you realise that you could actually use social media to interact with people during the antithesis between academic conferences.

And so this was on top of having to conduct the research, having to publish it, but being very strategic about using social media to promote your online visibility. That would then, parlay into visibility in the community. So the whole business of maintaining visibility was quite challenging, particularly in the early parts of my career.

Ritu G. Mehrish: I think one of the things in my work as somebody who works a lot with women leaders to the leadership programs is this challenge where a lot of women get to a point where they’re mid-management in the organisation and they’re like, now if I have kids, I will lose the momentum. Or if I take a break, I’ll lose the momentum. So I want us to just hear a little bit of your views. How did you manage the balance? I know it’s difficult, right? But any tips, any tricks on that? 

How to balance work and personal life as a woman leader?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: I think it’s actually really important to always remember to take care of your personal health. And I think that’s where when you are burning the candle on multiple ends you feel like you always have to give. The best of yourself to your job. You’ve got to give the best of yourself to your kids.

You’ve got to give the best of yourself to your spouse, and ultimately you can’t do any of that unless you give the best of yourself to yourself. So for example, now when I think about the things that I make sure I do at the start of every week, I’ve got quite a hectic schedule. Meeting industry partners hosting university visits, as well as going out to visit other universities.

And just a whole range of things. So what I do is I, at the start of the week, I make sure I go to my schedule and I see where there are Windows where I can go to the gym and exercise and then I put it into the schedule so that I will actually go and exercise and I don’t, along the way, commit to other meetings that will eat into this.

This, is gym time and I have found that this discipline is actually really good because gym time actually is more than just keeping active. It’s also when I catch up on my podcasts, it’s when I actually have time to just think about things without being. Sit seated in front of a device or hunch over my phone and so on.

Of course, I’m not saying that I managed this all well throughout my career. Clearly, when the children were smaller, things were a bit harrier. Now that they’re teenagers, they’re independent. The ability for me to be able to attend, say late. Networking events or going to the gym after dinner, it’s so much easier.

So I want to say to the younger women that it will get better over time because A, you become more capable and more adjusted to your own career path. And B your family situation also stabilises over time for the most part.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Thank you. I think that’s really great. Putting things on the calendar always helps. And I find often when you’re doing things, we often forget to be, create that visibility for ourselves. And there is this little notion, and I think that could also be culturally saying that, oh, if I do, if I’m doing a good job, like that’s all that matters. But actually, in reality, you do need to be strategic. You need to build your visibility and not just rely on the work that you’re doing.

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: That’s really good. So when you think about the whole sort of evolution of social media and the public means that it demands of you. So I can even remember the days of ster. And then, Facebook came along and I remember entering Facebook very tentatively because my students were on it and telling me about it.

And it seemed like what a university student was thinking to do. And it felt very awkward for the first time actually developing my online presence. Choosing even the profile photo was a long struggle. Every post that you put up, you’re thinking, seems so inane or seems so attention seeking or whatever, right?

But over time, depending on the community, depending on the purpose of the networking, depending on the kind of message that you want to, send and use the platform for, you will find a certain comfort level as to how visible you want to be and what kind of image you want to build on the platform.

For example, with my academic community of communication scholars, Facebook is still very important as a kind of water cooler for us. To discuss the latest moral challenges around say, generative AI. But it also is the same place where we would post pictures of our puppies or the cake that we baked and so on, and that helps with relationship building.

So Facebook for me has both a personal and a professional friend. And then of course LinkedIn I found to be tremendously helpful in terms of building connections with people beyond your physical networks. And it actually also opened the doors for me to connect across multiple sectors that I would otherwise not have the opportunity to meet or to.

Thinking about even connecting with LinkedIn would very much be where I do my professional voice. So really it’s a learning journey and it’s a matter of finding your comfort zone as to how public you want to be and what kinds of image you want to build on each platform.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Professor Lim in your work, are women jumping in and trying to take risks more than earlier? What’s been your view on women and entrepreneurship?

Are women taking more risks now?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: I would say that women in all sectors are being encouraged to step up more and feel that there is a greater impetus and a greater sense of support from the broader community. I’m active in, for example, the women in the technology sector in Singapore. And it’s a remarkable group of women, not all of whom were technologically trained.

Many of them who are leading tech companies were actually from the humanities or the social sciences like me, but they see the technology sector as being one that. Growing and similarly for entrepreneurship, you also see a lot of young women being able to imagine themselves playing a driving role in entrepreneurship, which is not to say that it is easy, but that the climate is much more welcoming than it used to be.

And I think when you go to, for example, entrepreneurship, and networking events, you may not see women dominate the room yet, but you definitely see a growing number of women like you. And so immediately you can connect with your tribe and it helps that We’ve also got women who are driving efforts across, say the tech sector or the startup world who helped to blaze the trail and who helped to build that sort of core group with whom you can connect and then expand from there. And at the same time, I think what is encouraging is that we also do have male allies in these sectors. Who are sincere and who are committed to actually having more diversity and not from a superficial perspective, but really wanting to reach out, wanting to sponsor women whom they can help to move and level up within different sectors.

Ritu G. Mehrish: If there were two or maybe three things or advice you would give to. Emerging women leaders or younger women leaders, what would those be from your experience?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: I would say that it’s important to see what it is you can bring to the table because every organisation that you join, there will be different opportunities for you to make a difference.

And I think that requires. Being humble, but also being assertive at the same time. I know it sounds almost contradictory, but on the one hand you have to enter a new organisation from the position of humility, which is that there is so much to learn. But on the other hand, you’ve also got to have the confidence to say, but there is so much I can give.

That sounds really good. Again, switching gears a little bit, you look back at your own career. Has there been a pivotal moment in your journey and is there a little bit, little story behind that?

Pivotal moment in Lim’s career

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: Ah, that’s an interesting question. So coming back to the university journey, the academic journey, the typical journey as I said is you want to get tenure. And what happens with tenure is if you’re successfully promoted to associate professor with tenure, it basically means that you’ve got your job all the way until retirement.

So there’s that certain security, there’s that certain security of employment and given the tenure model, very often people will join a university and if they’re tenured, they stay on in the university for their entire career, decades, literally from start to end. And I think I saw myself that way when I joined the National University of Singapore.

But along the way, because I was doing research on the social impact of technology and I was in a faculty of social sciences. I did feel that I was preaching to the converter because essentially all the social scientists agreed with me that technology had both positive and adverse implications. And yet I felt like the stuff that I was doing, I needed to communicate it to the technologists.

I needed the juniors, the programmers, the coders. The innovators know that, look, when you push technology out into the world, you’ve got to think about your social responsibility. You’ve got to think about human needs. And that’s when the Singapore University of Technology and Design opportunity came up for me to go there and be a Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.

So I could have done the conventional part, which was to stay on in NUS. But then I thought, hey, this is interesting to me to actually be able to nurture the next generation innovator. And so when I moved to S UTD, I had a whole new world of opportunities. And because the university is. So STEM dominated in every committee that I was in.

I was often the only social scientist. I was often the only female. I was often the youngest. And yet it created all kinds of possibilities for me to understand so much about tech technology. So much about, deep tech, Web Three, swarms, drones, about robotics. Internet of Things and so on.

And so it really allowed me to supercharge my own work in terms of the social impact technology to move beyond just understanding consumer technologies, but to deeper infrastructure technologies. And it’s allowed me to really sharpen my research. And to steer me into areas like AI ethics, which today with the explosion of generative AI has become so relevant.

So I would say that this was actually when some people were asking me and they said, why are you going to leave Asia’s top university to join a little boutique university that is so tech-dominated? Are you sure you’re not gonna get lost amidst all the tech? But actually, it opened up all kinds of possibilities.

And precisely because of that immersion into tech. I also became much more industry-friendly and much more industry-focused. So when the FMU partnerships and engagement role came along, it seemed like a perfect fit because I had been able to build my networks with industry partners. When I was nominated member of Parliament, I was also able to interact more with the people sector, with the public sector. So all the experiences from my different career opportunities came together very nicely and lined me up for this SMU role that I currently am undertaking.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Wow, so your risk paid off. And of course, you brought out a very you said it just as a statement, but the fact that you were a member of Parliament itself, I don’t know how many people get to do it or how many women especially get to do it. Professor Lim, I wanna ask you one more question which is more personal. How do you define success? What does success mean to you?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: I think success means doing work that is meaningful. That people regard as being of value to society more generally, but that also helps to make a positive difference in the lives of individuals. I’m very blessed in the sense that academic research ticks all those boxes because as an educator, you help to make sure that young people who are the leaders of tomorrow are actually conscious and aware of what societal challenges are out there and how they can be addressed. So that’s what a good social science education provides. The other box that it helps to take is that when we do research that is of value to society, then it also can help to sharpen policy.

It can help. Companies are more mindful of their corporate social responsibility. And so I would like to think that through my research, through my teaching, through the columns that I write about the latest technological issues I’ve been able to help society as a whole better come to grips with a lot of the changes that we are seeing every day.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Finally, what is one piece of advice you would have for your younger self?

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself. And I think over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to reinvent myself several times. And I think with every reinvention I’ve found, a new lease of life or a new way of looking at my role and the work that I do, and it makes, it keeps things fresh.

Closing

Ritu G. Mehrish: Wow. That’s really good advice. Before we close, I am gonna summarise Some of my takeaways because this conversation has been so great and so inspiring even for me. One of the key takeaways for me today was the first point that you made is that we all try to be the best.

Best of ourselves for everyone, but let’s be best of ourselves for ourselves. I think that is such a good takeaway. I love the point about putting things in your calendar. I try to do that. I fail sometimes, but I do try to do the same thing. But that’s my first takeaway from today. The second one is the importance of male allies.

I know when we talk about women leadership, women’s empowerment, we don’t talk enough. It sometimes becomes us versus them, but I think you pointed out the importance of having male allies in our ecosystem, in our lives. And that includes having the right partner, right? So having male allies is the second one.

And the third one is, of course, the last advice that you gave to your younger self, but which applies to all of us at every stage, is don’t be afraid. To reinvent yourself continuously. So thank you so much Professor Lim. It was such a pleasure speaking with you and was such a pleasure to have you on our show.

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: Really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for all the lovely questions. It gave me a chance to also reflect on my own journey, so I really appreciate this opportunity.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Thank you so much.

Prof. Sun Sun Lim: Thank you.

Our Guest: Prof. Sun Sun Lim

Sun Sun Lim is the Vice President of Partnerships and Engagement at the Singapore Management University where she is concurrently a Professor of Communication and Technology at its College of Integrative Studies. She has extensively researched the social impact of technology, focusing on technology domestication by families and young people, the future of work and AI ethics.