As the co-founder and CEO of Big Bang Academy, Sarah Tong wants the next generation to fall in love with learning through hands-on experiences and to promote science as a favourite subject for both boys and girls
When Sarah Tong enrolled in her engineering degree at the University of Cambridge in 2011, the stats were stacked against her. She was not only in the minority as an Asian, but also as a woman, with, she says, just 20 to 30 percent of her cohort being fellow females. The stats for her tutors and teachers were even worse. She recollects that 95 percent of them were male.
“I realised there was a problem, because when you don’t see a future you in that field, or you don’t have people who look like you surrounding you, you feel like you don’t belong,” says Tong, who did some research and discovered that a lack of representation meant there was a higher chance of young girls leaving the field of STEM. “This was part of the reason why I wanted to start my academy. I feel like the love for science and the love for learning should be equal, no matter your gender or race.”
Tong’s own love of science started early. “I was a huge science geek growing up,” she says, reminiscing about reading encyclopaedias and the Chinese science book One Hundred Thousand Whys. But her most memorable moment—the one that triggered a love of figuring out how the world works—occurred when she was six years old. An avid television watcher, her father, who was an engineer, hated her spending time glued to a screen so he removed the fuse. Tong found the fuse and eventually figured out how to put it back into the television set and make it work again. “I didn’t know what a fuse was, but it solved this problem in my life. So, I started reading about electricity circuits and how a TV works,” she says. Later came physics, astronomy and string theory as she immersed herself in the world of science. And until university, she never felt like she didn’t belong there. “I went to an all-girls school, so I wasn’t subjected to any biases or stereotypes for girls in science,” she says.
After graduating, Tong didn’t know what she wanted to do. “Coming from a top university a lot of people aspire to become either a consultant or an investment banker. I didn’t think twice and just went for something mainstream,” says Tong, who began pursuing a career in the latter. But, a few years into investment banking, she’d had enough. The hours were inhospitable, and she wanted a change. “Reflecting on what I wanted to do, it came back to my childhood passion and what I naturally liked while growing up. And that was science.”
At the time, Tong worked with Nixon Chan, a fellow Cambridge graduate with a degree in biology. Like Tong, he had nurtured a passion for science from a young age. “We clicked on the idea that in early childhood, a positive memory can change a kid’s life forever,” says Tong. “That’s why we wanted to start a business that could influence kids from all over the world from a young age to fall in love with learning hands-on science.”
The pair started doing in-person classes and workshops part-time in 2019, before leaving their respective roles at the bank in 2020 and committing fully to the Big Bang Academy. In the midst of Covid, quick pivoting was required and the model for Big Bang became one of hybrid learning, offering both online and offline education. The secret to its success? Using animations and actors to present the science concepts to ensure that online learning was engaging, while also sending science kits to kids at home so learning did not comprise solely of passive listening, but there would be hands-on experiments to capture kids’ attention.
The hybrid learning also meant that Big Bang Academy was not limited to the Hong Kong market, and the duo currently boast customers in Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea as well as in Hong Kong. Additionally, the Big Bang Academy YouTube channel has a global audience with around two million organic views currently coming from across the globe, predominantly from the US, India and Canada. Tong shares more about her journey from banking to Big Bang and how she hopes to inspire a whole generation to love science.
How did you find going from banking to becoming an entrepreneur?
It’s very fulfilling, but at the same time it’s the most challenging thing I have ever done in my life. As an entrepreneur you have to learn quickly and deal with not being perfect. I think if you grow up in traditional schooling and then go into a big corporate, especially for women, we always want to be perfect and perform the best in everything. But as an entrepreneur, you can’t be perfect all the time, because if you want to be perfect, you can’t execute. A lot of it is about embracing yourself and moving fast. That’s been a big challenge for me because it comes with a lot of failures. If you move fast, it means you’re experimenting and you’re not perfect.