WHILE her friends searched for jobs in banks and major companies, she doubled her efforts into setting up her own cocktail bar.

"It had always been my parents' dream to open a food and beverage outlet of some sort, but they always lamented that they were too old," says Miss Angelina Pradana.

The 23-year-old is the eldest of three girls, whose parents run a cosmetics business.

Armed with a $100,000 bank loan made in her father's name, the Chinese Indonesian, who is now a Singapore permanent resident, set out to fulfil their dream.

In September last year, she launched The Studio cocktail bar on North Bridge Road.

It was only three months earlier that she graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration.

There are just two employees - a mixologist and a cleaner. So Miss Pradana wears many hats.

"I play the host, waitress and boss," she quips.

In order to keep costs low, her 22-year-old sister, a graduate from Raffles Design Institute, designed the bar's black-and-white interior as well as the look of its menu - for free.

The bar, which is about the size of a studio apartment, has all of seven drinks on its menu, three of which the young entrepreneur learnt to whip up herself.

It wasn't easy at the start.

She says: "Besides my degree from NUS which helped a little, gaining the respect from suppliers and customers was difficult.

"I even had an exceptionally blunt customer who told me straight, 'You're very young. How far can you go? Businesses like yours will surely fail.'"

However, Miss Pradana remains undeterred.

"Comments like that only make me even more motivated to succeed. There's still a lot of room for my business to grow," she says.

For now, the bar, which sells drinks ranging from $18 to $35 per glass brings in just enough to cover the monthly cost of $15,000.

But it has not made any profit.

The petite woman, who is attached, makes no qualms about the sacrifices she has had to make.

"No more shopping on Orchard Road on Fridays and Saturdays since I spend them working now," she says, adding: "I don't really draw a salary. It's such an early stage in the business, so I just take what I need for my basic needs, like food and petrol."

She has had some hiccups.

"When I first started out I didn't know anything, including the kind of experts to look out for. "I ended up hiring a bartender who had a lot of experience working at a club and making the regular standard drinks, but little knowledge about cocktails," she says.

The bartender ordered about 20 bottles of artificial syrup.

They were to be used in drinks. They were later dumped.

"Some time after we opened, I hired bar consultants - people who had been in the industry for many years, who told me that proper cocktail bars don't use syrup any more, so I had to dump the whole lot," she says, adding that she made a loss of about $250 from the incident.

Crowds are modest. On an average night, 10 to 15 customers, who include accountants, bankers and doctors, hit the bar, which has standing room for 80 people. The bar opens every day except Sunday.

"When we first launched, I had nightmares about no one coming to the bar," she says with a laugh, adding that the journey has been more difficult than she first anticipated.

Still, she has no regrets.

The people she has met on the job are what makes the sacrifices worth it, she says.

"One of the reasons why I chose to go into this line of business, instead of opening a restaurant or cafe is because I wanted my job to allow me to make friends with people my age," says Miss Pradana, who knows most of her regular customers by name.

"Whenever I'm at the bar - especially when we close for private events - I feel like I'm crashing someone else's party. It's very fun," she adds.

This article was first published in The New Paper.