I came to the MNPM program with almost a decade of non-profit experience, in India, with a focus on talent acquisition and fundraising. The University of Hong Kong helped connect me with relevant scholarship opportunities that enabled me to confirm my admission. While I greatly enjoyed gaining context about the nonprofit sector in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Macau, perhaps what I leant most from was the electives. The structure allowed us to pick the direction of our learning and I spent the year engaging with strategy, branding, board management, impact evaluation and fund development. While the learnings from the program were significant, the 2019-2020 academic year was challenging for all of us, first with the civic protests and then with the pandemic. The professors did their best to adapt to this environment and ensure our academics were uninterrupted. They were approachable, flexible and proactive with their help. 

Learnings from the MNPM degree helped increase my potential for impact within an organisation and I hope to leverage my enhanced knowledge and skill to influence social impact in the APAC region.

Before I enrolled in this course, I had been working as a social worker for 4.5 years in Singapore. Coming into this course was a great decision for me, as I was exposed to the management side of the nonprofit sector, such as governance issues, strategic planning and management, performance measurement and assessment, among others. In particular, I appreciated the lecturers’ experience and expertise in their various domains, and their openness in sharing their insights about nonprofit management with us. We also had many guest speakers and site visits across the different modules, which further grounded our learning in the real world.

The MNPM course, though shorter than other Masters’ courses, was no less rigorous – in particular, the capstone project required us to analyse an issue faced by the nonprofit organisations we partnered, and also to produce a deliverable that would be useful for them. As I had minimal exposure to the nonprofit sector in Hong Kong before this course, this was an added challenge for me. Hence, I had to learn from my groupmates how to contextualise our deliverable for our partner nonprofits. Thankfully, as a group we were able to design a deliverable that not just offered a solution to their issue, but was also something that could be implemented immediately.

Since completing the course, I have returned to my nonprofit and started work in a new department, helping in a leadership role. With my experiences and knowledge from the MNPM course, I have been involved in programme planning and implementation, and also helped to review the progress made in our various programmes. 

For prospective students who are considering this course, know that this course will stretch you, expose you to areas of the nonprofit sector you may be unfamiliar with, and train you both in hard and soft skills. If you are up for this challenge, you will gain not just knowledge and skills, but also a shift in the way you think about and look at nonprofit issues.

Before studying in Master of Social Sciences in Nonprofit Management degree, I did not have any working experience related to the nonprofit sector. This course is very fruitful to enrich and equip myself for my future career. It does not only provide an overall picture of this sector in the Hong Kong context, but also discusses Greater China, Taiwan and the U.S. through case studies and examples. Also, we can learn about current trends of philanthropy through classes and interaction with professors and experienced classmates. Moreover, we can understand how to manage a nonprofit organization strategically from a financial perspective, including performance measurement, assessment and program evaluation. Apart from the hard skills (e.g. research, analytical and interview skills), I also improved my soft skills, such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving and communication. Ultimately, I hope that I can utilize what I have learnt to create more social impacts for the society in the future.

The academic year 2017-2018 was an amazing journey to me. I enjoyed both theoretical and practical courses that I learned in this programme. Throughout this one-year of study, I equipped myself to excel in nonprofit management careers. I have mastered cutting-edge of nonprofit management knowledge, such as current issues in policy, financial planning, and strategic problem-solving skills. Through on-campus learning with professors, online tutorials with classmates, and collaborative and independent coursework, it enabled my dynamic interaction around course content. In addition, the programme also regularly invited high-profile experienced market leaders from China and overseas as guest lecturers that brought us current social issues, new insights and innovative ideas all over the world. It deepened my knowledge and practice competence through their experience sharing. Though the programme was intensive, the programme has covered extensive knowledge in management, capacity enhancement as well as effective leadership within one academic year. I learned how to think out of the box and I loved to share my observation to my class. I look forward to bring out my knowledge into practice and become a change maker in the society.

I had worked for an international nonprofit organization as the fundraising officer for more than seven years in the Mainland China and Hong Kong offices. Studying the MSocSc (NPM) programme was a fruitful journey which has not only opened my eyes to the global development in the nonprofit sector but also helped me to identify and learn the knowledge gap in the field of social sciences on top of my engineering education background. The comprehensive and rigorous curriculum balanced the local need with regional complexity while considering global trends and knowledge in social, political and economic dimensions. It prepared me to integrate knowledge into practice and action.