Favorite Common Curriculum Class

One of the classes that had a big impact on my Yale-NUS journey early on was Quantitative Reasoning (QR), a course that we take in our first year as part of the Common Curriculum.The class is an introduction to quantitative methods and some basic statistics, and we also learn how to code in the R language. This class rekindled my interest in coding and in mathematics, which were topics that I had done well in in high school, but had not considered as an option for my major. QR reminded me why I enjoyed these topics so much, and it nudged me towards trying out some MCS classes. Once I started, I spiraled very deep into the MCS major!
Click here to learn more about the Common Curriculum!

Favorite Major Class

Discrete Mathematics opened my eyes to the field of combinatorics and graph theory, and the class was taught with a strong hands-on problem-solving methodology, which really helped to spark my interest in the topics. In fact, almost all the undergraduate research I have done was on something related to combinatorics or graph theory!
Click here to learn more about the MCS Major!

Favorite Elective Class

I took Asian Theatre as my first ever elective module, and I decided to try it out because I was curious about theatre and it seemed like an interesting course. As a complete beginner, it was definitely a step out of my comfort zone, but I really enjoyed the physicality of the course, and I also found the theory very interesting. It was far from an easy course for me, but it was precisely the type of experience I hoped to get in Yale-NUS!
Click here to learn more about the Arts & Humanities Major!

Week 7: “Stories of Ourselves”

For week 7, I stayed in Singapore for a course titled “Stories of Ourselves” which explored the various narratives that exist in Singapore about the lives we lead. We spent a good time looking at the narrative provided by the state, and then explored some alternate narratives by speaking with individuals who shared their lived experiences. As a Singaporean, the course really made me seriously explore my relationship with my country, and broadened my understanding of the civic society discourse in Singapore. It convinced me to look deeper into these issues, and pushed me to be a more active citizen!  

Semester Abroad: The University of Copenhagen (Denmark)

The University of Copenhagen is well known in the region for the science research conducted, and I had the chance to take a number of MSc level courses with the Computer Science department there. I was also lucky enough to work with researchers in CopeNLU on an independent research project on Natural Language Understanding and Graph Theory! 

My semester in Copenhagen was the longest time that I’ve spent outside of Singapore, and I really embraced the challenge of learning to live in a new city, finding a routine, and making new connections. Some of my favorite memories revolved around discovering a new interest in social dancing, and the number of friends that I’ve made through that experience!   

Summer Abroad: Self-Sourced Internship Funding (Denmark)

My Year 3 summer was also spent in Copenhagen, with the support of the self-sourced internship fund offered by CIPE. This allowed me to spend the summer working full time with a research lab in Copenhagen. Many of the fond memories involve casual conversations with the other researchers in the lab over common interests, and learning about all the cool research topics that people were working on! The researchers were very welcoming and I really connected with them, and that was a very nice way to begin my journey into research. It was a truly eye–opening experience as I was treated just like a PhD student, allowing me to work independently while benefiting from the supervision of other experienced researchers. It was this experience that made me decide to pursue a PhD in Machine Learning in the future, as I found the research experience to be incredibly rewarding!  

Favorite Common Curriculum Class

The thing about the Common Curriculum is that often when you’re going through it, especially if you’re feeling really sure about your intended major (which I was), you might question, how will this knowledge serve me? But a while later, you look back at this experience and you feel grateful for having been exposed to how different disciplines understand and interact with the world, for learning different types of knowledge, and realize you’re a better person because of it. From that perspective, I don’t really know if I’d have a favorite. But I really enjoyed my experience in Literature and Humanities 2 and Modern Social Thought.
Click here to learn more about the Common Curriculum!

Favorite Major Class

Firms Strategy and Market Competition was the course that cemented my decision to major in Economics, but I think my favorite class would have to be Labour Economics or Development Economics. Both of these classes were very well taught and engaging, and had a good mix between theory and real-life examples. The kinds of paper we looked at in these two classes really showed me that Economics can be a very expansive field, with tools that can be used to look at all sorts of things happening around us. 
Click here to learn more about the Economics Major!

Favorite Elective Class

This is a really difficult question, I enjoyed most of the electives I took (including for my minor). In first year, I took Global Women’s History with Prof. Rebecca Tannenbaum, which was a very important awakening experience for me to learn more about women’s social position in the world and how it has changed over time. I also loved my time in Woolf and Historiography with Prof. Heidi Stella, it was a very challenging course that pushed me to look at literature in a way I had not before and gave me a lot of room to interrogate my preoccupations meaningfully.

Week 7: China

I went on a research trip with Professor Valerie Hansen to Xiamen to look at China in the Year 1000! I think the most memorable part of it was just going into temples, conducting research on the area’s history, interviewing the temple workers and learning about how field work is done.

Semester Abroad: Bocconi University (Italy)

I went on semester exchange at Bocconi University in Milan, one of the best schools for Economics. Bocconi was great for me because they also had classes on art management and policies. I had the chance to take a class taught by a gallerist, work on a project that was pitched to the Prada Foundation and an economics course given by the Vice President of ISPI (Italian Institute for International Political Studies). I also really enjoyed living in Milan and being able to travel to nearby Italian cities and towns for quick weekend trips, it was just a dream. 

Summer Abroad: Internship at Christie’s (USA)

I interned at Christie’s in New York  in my second year. At the time I was already considering if I wanted to minor in Art History and think about working around art objects, so this was a great opportunity to get my foot into the door and gain experience from the art market side of things. My favorite part of the experience was probably just being there, in one of the world’s most important art cities and being at the heart of it all. 

Favorite Common Curriculum Class

It’s genuinely very difficult to choose, because I really enjoyed the Common Curriculum. The best one for me has to have been Comparative Social Inquiry (CSI). CSI was my first exposure to the deep and fascinating world of social sciences: critical social theory, anthropology, and sociology completely opened my mind to examining the familiar through an entirely new lens. I had an incredibly dedicated and enthusiastic professor, Michael Maniates, who inspired me deeply in my first year in Singapore and who has ended up playing a core role in my Yale-NUS experience and my educational decisions since.
Click here to learn more about the Common Curriculum!

Favorite Major Class

It has to be a tie between Christina Tarnopolosky’s Emotions and Politics, and Elton Chan’s Chinese Political Philosophy. Both of these courses exemplified the breadth of the intellectual curiosity at the heart of the PPE major. Both courses took strands of history, politics, current affairs, art, and literature and wove them all together into a cohesive story of human societies. I found these classes illuminating, and still highly relevant to me today.
Click here to learn more about PPE!

Favorite Elective Class

In my final semester of my senior year I took Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Foundations of the Environmental Humanities, a colourful and wide-ranging course that crossed the realms of environmental literature, film, ecocriticism, philosophy, and politics. I loved how unconventional and creative this course was in subject matter and approach. Coincidentally, one of the essays I wrote in that class has just been published as part of an anthology called Eating Chili Crab in the Anthropocene, published by Ethos Books, and contains a number of pieces by Yale-NUS students. Click here to learn more about Environmental Studies! 

Week 7: Sakaerat (Thailand)

We went to Sakaerat, a conservation centre in a jungle near Bangkok, Thailand. For me it was an entirely unexpected Week 7 trip, but was all the more rewarding for the fact that it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life. We spent much of it observing local wildlife, including the intricacies of butterfly wings and how they refract light. This particular area in Thailand is known to be the world-leading spot for four metre-long giant cobras (as well as many other snakes, spiders, and butterflies). Those cobras have stuck in my mind since!

Semester Abroad: University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

During my Junior year I was able to achieve a dream of mine to attend the University of Oxford, a hugely consequential and enjoyable experience that ended up drawing me back a second time to complete my Masters. I attended St Catherine’s College, and was able to study a variety of courses from the Oxford PPE syllabus as well as try my hand at some masters-level content and research at the School of Geography and Environment.

Summer Abroad: Internship at Wold Affairs Councils of America (Washington, D.C.)

CIPE generously supported me to complete an internship in Washington, D.C. during my sophomore year summer. The internship was with the World Affairs Councils of America, the largest international affairs and education Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) in the United States. It was a dynamic and exciting time to be in D.C., and I had fantastic experiences attending House and Senate hearings and a wide variety of talks and events happening around the city.

Yale-NUS College LABs:

One of my most memorable Yale-NUS experiences was certainly the Learning Across Boundaries (LAB) trip I went on to Israel and Palestine. The focus of the trip was wide-ranging, covering the history, politics, and religions of the Middle East. I was bowled over by the complexity and depth of the stories told to us, and by how incredibly ancient the landscape and environment was. Coming from the relatively young country of New Zealand, it was my first connection to deep time and history.

Favorite Common Curriculum Class

Modern Social Thought. It was an ambitious course that covered most of the foundational topics in political science, social thought, and critical theory. It tied together many of the themes explored in other Common Curriculum courses while illustrating the force of ideas and the ways they gave rise to the institutions and revolutions that shaped our world. By contextualizing these theories in a larger dialogue of ideas, the course also demonstrated how these concepts weren’t made from scratch but instead were built upon the insights of the works that preceded them. That lesson alone was worth the price of admission.
Click here to learn more about the Common Curriculum!

Favorite Major Class

The Theory and Practice of Environmental Policymaking. It’s a class about environmental policy, but its lessons are about people and their decisionmaking and the ways they organize around politics and ideology. It challenges you to understand the underlying dynamics that drive political struggle and that can create the conditions for social change. The course upends the idea that policies can ever be made by technocrats in an environment sanitized of politics and values. The lessons I took away from this class are the ones I use most in my work now.
Click here to learn more about Environmental Studies!

Favorite Elective Class

Contemporary Social Theory. It was designed as an optional sequel to Modern Social Thought. It continued the ambitious agenda of Modern Social Thought into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, covering topics like reflexive sociology, critical theory, and Orientalism. In line with this jump to the contemporary era, it pushed us to apply these ideas to present debates around gender identity, religious expression, and ethnic representation. It also urged us to think critically about the state of political discourse and how technology has impacted democratic ideals. This course, more than any other, made me a better 21st century citizen.

Week 7: Varieties of Religious Experience in Singapore

My Week 7 was titled Varieties of Religious Experience in Singapore. We visited different places of worship around Singapore and teased out how place and context were just as important as sacred text to a lived religion. My favorite memory from this (and honestly one of the best memories from my college experience) has to be celebrating my 18th birthday with a rabbi we spoke with who then sung me happy birthday in four different languages.

Summer Abroad

Freshman summer, two of my best friends and I were awarded a CIPE travel fellowship to document a journey from Singapore to London by train. Sophomore summer, I put together an internship that CIPE generously funded with the Story of Stuff Project where I supported them in their work on a plastic pollution bill. Junior summer, I worked with the outgoing dean of the Yale Forestry School to set up his new organization: the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Out of all this, my favorite memory would be riding horses with my friends on the Monglian steppe during our travel fellowship.

Yale-NUS College LABs:

As part of a LAB, I went to the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015. That whole week I was there was a nonstop series of emotional and eye-opening experiences. It was an incredible privilege to get to meet and hear from the people that were making history working on the climate challenge.

Semester Abroad: Yale College

I spent the spring of 2016 at Yale College where I made some of my closest friends.