Evelyn Clarissa Siregar wrote on Threads on Sept. 19 that she had accepted a place in the full-time program’s January 2027 intake and had less than three months to raise the fees, AsiaOne reported.
Her S$3,000 tuition discount was “far from enough,” she wrote, and she would also need S$2,000-2,500 a month to live in Singapore.
SMU lists the program’s tuition at S$82,840 including tax and offers ASEAN citizens a one-time S$3,000 discount, according to its admissions website.
Siregar said she could not repay sponsors in money and offered her skills instead, pointing to her experience in sales and content creation.
“I’m 28, with no husband and no kids. I have absolutely nothing preventing me from soaring higher except for the funding,” she wrote.
Commenters accused her of begging online, pointing to her social media posts from trips to South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia and asking why she had not worked and saved for the degree.
Her reply that she lacked the privilege of doing so drew more criticism. Siregar then said she was emailing and meeting potential sponsors and applying for scholarships.
“Call me entitled if you want, but I’m just a girl knocking on every single door to fight for my dream,” she added.
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A view of the Singapore Management University. Photo courtesy of Hong Huazheng |
In a following Instagram post on Sept. 24, she apologized for responding defensively to critics. “I was too entitled and failed to consider the bigger picture,” she wrote.
The Independent Singapore reported that she had deleted the original Threads post. Siregar maintained that asking for sponsorship was not wrong in itself, only the way she had gone about it.
In a revised pitch, she said she wanted to connect researchers, investors and industry to help Southeast Asian products compete globally, starting with beauty and consumer goods. She said an MBA in Singapore would equip her to do so.
She also wrote that she had been rejected for several scholarships and programs and failed several standardized tests before SMU admitted her, and that this was her last attempt at an MBA.
The second post drew noticeably more support, according to AsiaOne. Some users still faulted it for offering no figures and said the plan made little financial sense for a sponsor.
Siregar, a pharmacist by training who works in business-to-business tech sales at a small company, told Mothership she had tried and failed to find a full-time job that would let her study part-time.
She described the sponsorship she seeks not as a gift but as a “value exchange.”