She got into Raffles Girls' Primary School, she says, on the coat tails of her cleverer older sisters. "But I couldn't sustain it. That was why I was kicked to Pasir Panjang Secondary School," she adds self-deprecatingly.

She was, she claims, a wall- flower: tall, gawky and excruciatingly shy.

"I shouldn't be telling you this but at 15, when other girls were wearing bras, I was still wearing a singlet. So no, I was not popular with the boys."

Her gawkiness and her pigeon gait got one of her older brothers sufficiently worried to ask their mother to do something about the situation. Her mother decided to invest $200 for her to attend a deportment course conducted by a modelling agency.

The course more than just improved her daughter's posture, it led to a career - but not before a lot of tears were shed.

"After a few sessions, one of the instructors asked me if I was keen to do fashion shows. I was flattered but it was also made quite clear to me that it was because of my height, and not my looks," she says.

Determined to do something about her shyness, the then 16-year-old accepted the offer.

Parading in public was harder than she expected. But she steeled herself.

"I told myself that since I decided to do this, I had to do it well. I had to understand the profession, and

I needed personality to showcase what I had to model. I had to get rid of my fear," she says.

To go for broke, the business student decided to drop out of Ngee Ann Polytechnic in her second year.

"I was not very good at multitasking and I felt that if I continued that way, I would not succeed in either."