EDITORS’ NOTE
Issue 12: 29 April 2014 Chief Editor: Indrani Kaliyaperumal Editors: Joyan Tan and Spandana Bhattacharya
President’s Note Collective effervescence
Photo credits to the President’s Office
Just a few weeks ago, we had almost two hundred prospective students here for the Experience Yale-NUS Weekend. Meeting these young students at a time of decision, as they are choosing how to spend the next four crucial years of their lives, made me think back to when you, our first hundred and fifty students, were making a similar choice a year or two ago. Our community has indeed blossomed. When I see how all of you have advanced in music and art, drama and dance, argument and narrative, science and statistics, social thought and social activism, I am amazed at the learning that can be accomplished in such a short time. A colleague who visited us from New Haven, quoting Durkheim, commented on a feeling of “collective effervescence” here at Yale-NUS, the sense that we are all participating in a bold experiment, and that we have put ourselves fully into this collective experience, this complex dance. I know that I am not the only one of my colleagues on the faculty and staff who feels that the past year has been the most challenging and most exciting of my career. Even though our hair may be grayer, we feel younger than we did a year ago. Like you, we have tried to learn from our setbacks as well as our successes. We are privileged to learn alongside all of you. You are all now headed out to various corners of the world: to study in China or Spain or New Haven or here in Singapore; to work in businesses or laboratories or NGO’s; to travel abroad or to rest at home. Enjoy this time of renewal. You have done remarkable work and had memorable experiences this past year. May our next three years together be just as effervescent.
Hello students, staff, faculty, administrators, and the community at large! It’s kind of hard to believe that one entire year has passed and come next year, we will be sophomores. PANOPT has run for an entire year, and we will soon be celebrating our second year anniversary! At this point, there are some people to thank and some announcements to make. First off, we would like to extend an enormous THANK YOU to Vice-Rector LageOtero and Indrani for being so helpful and patient with us. Thank you VR for taking time to proof-read every single one of our issues, correcting grammatical and spelling errors and giving very valuable feedback. Thank you Indra for helping us to print every single issue so that we can put them up (and thanks to Nurul as well who stepped into this role from time to time). Without both of you, PANOPT would not have been possible. Secondly, as PANOPT moves into our second year, we will be moving to the status of a Student Organization under the Dean of Students Office. The status of a Student Organization will grant us greater access to funding, resources, and also being able to participate in events such as Orientation. We also want to open our doors to other students in the college to come on board as well! Thirdly, PANOPT will become a weekly instead of a biweekly publication. There are so many things happening in our college that a biweekly publication cannot cover everything we want to include! We will also be recruiting new people onto the PANOPT editorial team (you might have seen the posters around…) who will play a huge role in expanding PANOPT come next semester. We hope to live up to our vision of covering all aspects of student life and moving to a weekly publication reflects this. Alright, that’s all from us now! We hope you enjoy reading this last issue of PANOPT for our first academic year, and that everyone has an awesome summer ahead!
THANK YOU DEANS’ FELLOWS! To all DFs: Thank you for making our first year incredible in every way. Special shout-out to my amazing DF Ben, who made transitioning to college life so easy for me and my DF group (: - Kinnari
Thanks to all the DFs who made their comforting presence felt one way or another – the smiles along the hallways; the genuine “How are you doing?”; Ryan who invests enormous time and effort in us: organizing DF outings, buying chocolates, and green tea tidbits for us when he was overseas… the list can go on and on! - Christina DFs: Thank you for all the food parties, the meditations, the support, the laughter, the fun, and… thank you for being you. – Wan Ping Ben, thank you for always being such a positive energy! I always have the best conversations with you and am going to miss your openness and kindness next year! - Anonymous Student
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KNOW YOUR PROFESSOR:
Professor Kang Hway Chuan
Professor Kang Hway Chuan Professor Kang was an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He received a BS from Yale University (1983) and a PhD from Caltech (1989). He joined NUS in 1992 and continues there as a joint appointee in the Department of Chemistry and the University Scholars’ Program.
As someone who has studied in Yale and taught at NUS, what are your thoughts on Yale-NUS as a collaboration between both schools? I think we shouldn’t strive to be an average of both schools – that would be quite bad. And I also don’t think we should strive to be more like NUS or more like Yale. I have never thought about situating this school along that axis. The way we think about it, is what do we want the students to know at the start of the 21st century? Education is always evolving, and I think this is one place in the world where education is evolving rapidly. In some sense, we are very conveniently located because the rest of Asia is developing very quickly. At the same time, there are many older education centers, maybe in Europe and in North America, that are quite different from educational traditions in say, India or China. So we are located in a really opportunistic place, both in terms of time and location. I believe that we should do something different, not just to be distinct from all the institutions out there, but because we are looking at what is happening in the 21st century. One part of that is, of course, for me, thinking about what the role of scientific education is for a person who is going to be educated in the 21st century. There are very many issues that will come up in Science. Maybe you won’t solve them with science or technology, but in order to navigate these issues and understand the problem, we will need to have a fair idea about how science is done, how engineers work, what goes on behind the machines, how medicine works. If we don’t understand that sufficiently, I think we won’t be able to navigate our lives successfully. So that’s what we’re trying to do here. What, according to you, are the main differences in the way science is taught at NUS and Yale-NUS? There are a couple of different things that have to do with what you are trying to teach and how you’re teaching it. In YaleNUS, we try to start from a basic level for all students – how do scientists think, how do people make scientific arguments, what constitutes a good or valid way of answering a question in a scientific fashion? In most places, this is not the case. If you are a science major, you jump into Chemistry 101 or Physics 101. And if you are not a science major, you take different types of classes that bring a more popularized version of science to everybody; sometimes it gets to the point where you are really talking about the science rather than talking science. We try not to do that here. Another thing done differently here is that we look at what is required in a major and we try to distill it. The idea is that we are trying to make the majors strong but not overwhelmingly heavy. So the guiding principle is- what does somebody who wants to be a physics major need to know, or what does a physical science major who wants to specialize in chemistry need to know? Therefore the size of the major can be quite different and what goes into the major is a cleaner set of things, rather than being cluttered by electives that are interesting but may be something you want to pursue later on in your life. How will Foundations of Science build on Scientific Inquiry? One way to think about it is that Scientific Inquiry gives you the basic moves, the basic principles of how you make arguments in science, how you think in science going from evidence to conclusion. I suppose Foundations of Science takes that so-called furniture in the mind and goes on to decorate the rest of it. There’s a lot of stuff in it- it’s not just knowing how to write sentences, but then you also want to know what to write about. That’s the way I think Foundations builds on Scientific Inquiry. That’s also how Integrated Science builds on Scientific Inquiry. But both of them direct students to different end points, the assumption being that one group of students are interested in pursuing science as a career, and the other group, maybe not. There have been some concerns about Foundations of Science being two semesters long. What are your thoughts about it? Someone recently asked me about that and I’ve been having conversations about this with some colleagues. The argument I see for taking a longer amount of time with Foundations of Science is that Science is a big intellectual endeavor, and there’s a lot of beautiful stuff in it. The only problem is that the learning curve is a little steeper. So if you don’t spend enough time on it, you end up either hearing or reading about Science. Nowadays, there are many popular science books being written about big ideas, or small cute things about science. But the actual science is not quite apparent, unless you do a bit of climbing. So I guess that’s probably one reason why we have it for two semesters rather than one. And there are also some people who want it to last more semesters rather than two, but those are the constraints for a college life of 4 years. There are great big beautiful things in Science that are sometimes missed. What research are you working on currently? I am a computational chemist. I work on computers and try to answer questions that have to do with what molecules do. So I think about the theory and about how one uses computers to do what molecules are actually doing without going to the lab. The computational chemist helps to imagine new molecules that can consequently be made, and even before they are made, we can figure out what kind of properties they have. Maybe they are interesting, or maybe they illustrate something. Because of molecules, I am interested in other things that have to do with semi-conductors: I work on silicon and germanium. Computers and hand phones are made of silicon, and there is often a race in the electronic industry to use science to make electronics compute faster. What are your hobbies? Once a year, I go out to sea with my brother and we go diving. I don’t have much time for that in the year, so I can only do that in the long break. The other thing I like to do is to keep fish; this has to do with growing up in this part of the world where there are so many tropical fish. I tend to keep those that are less popular in fish shops; I keep those that are more challenging and try to breed them. 2
“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.” Rumi The first 5 months of 2011 were perhaps the most physically, emotionally and mentally demanding months of my life. My family and I had just returned from Philadelphia, where my husband and I had both been undertaking Masters programs at the University of Pennsylvania. As an engineer with the Singapore Navy, he had to resume work immediately and I returned to Singapore having the 2nd semester of my program uncompleted. In order to graduate, I had to fly back to Philly once a month from January to May. It seemed doable – except I had never flown alone before, had a 2-year old daughter who was trying to adapt back to Singapore life and enroll in pre-school and every time I flew back it was just for 3 days before I was back on the plane home.
Sha-En is the Senior Manager of Wellness in YaleNUS, working under the Dean of Students Office. Photo credits to Sha-En
The night I was due to fly off for my first flight, my relatives insensitively said, ‘You are such a bad mother, leaving your daughter here to pursue your own desires. Can’t you see she’s sad you’re leaving? And how are you going to compensate the family financially?’ The pain in my heart was intense, and I started to question myself. How do I balance my motherly and familial duties with my personal dream of studying under Positive Psychology’s founder Dr Martin Seligman? Was I really a ‘bad mother’ and ‘bad wife’? Needless to say, the hours waiting at the airport for the plane to take off were teary ones. The flight journey was long: 5 hours flight to Shanghai, transit for 7 hours, 15 hours flight to New York and another 2 hours on the train before I take another bus to my accommodation in Philly. Every hour seemed to pass exceedingly slow – I missed my family and as I was unable to sleep much, began to feel the onset of the dreaded flu. When I finally arrived in Philly, after disastrous airline food, not lying horizontal for almost 26 hours and having developed an increasingly choking cough, I asked myself, ‘Why in heaven’s name am I doing this?’ Upon reaching my accommodation, I flopped on the bed with my shoes still on. The first hours when I got up the next morning were a whirl. My head throbbed, I had lost my voice due to coughing through the night and the blizzardly winds made things worse. I found it hard to concentrate in class, had to ask questions to professors by writing on pieces of paper, and could not wait to get back to my bed. I longed for buzzing intellectual conversations but ended up half-collapsed in the corner of the classroom. And I had to fly back in 3 days. ‘Can’t somebody teleport me back to Singapore?’ I whined. The morning I was due to fly, as I sucked on what must’ve been the 50th lozenges, I received a call from one of my classmates ‘Shaen, let me send you to the airport. I can at least make the first part of your journey more bearable.’ Tears of joy streamed down my face and it suddenly became clear to me why I was making this journey. I want to achieve my dream, and I am in the company of people who share that dream. More importantly, they love me and treat me like family. The journey back home seemed less tedious and in fact, every flight from then on became easier once I knew ‘why’ I had to go through this. I prepared myself for the long lonely flights by downloading tons of movies on my iPad, I brought along melatonin so I could rest well on the plane, and did my pre-readings en-route. I drank coffee early in the morning so I could fight jet-lag but avoided in the evenings so I could sleep well at night. To keep my family close when I was in Philly, I turned down socials with my classmates so I could skype and hear ‘I love you’ from my husband and daughter. In order to contribute financially to the family, I worked as a part-time lecturer in between flights. Finally, I kept myself physically well by working out and eating healthily, so I would not fall ill. What do you want in your life? What is important to you, what is the ‘why’? To discover the why, ask, ‘what would happen if I do/don’t do this?’ and ‘what would that mean to me, to the people in my life?’ Discovering the why will push you to prioritizing and balancing your life. It will allow you to decide what to hang on to, and what to let go of. In this case, my dream and my family were both top priorities so I ensured that they were not left out. I hung on to health, so I could study, do assignments and enjoy germ-free precious time with my family. I let go of my own fears (loneliness), relatives expectations and painful words and sometimes, fun opportunities with my classmates. And in the end, I made it. I graduated! And I got a picture with Dr Martin Seligman!
Thank you YNC community for all the small things that make this school wonderful: the DOS for giving us those wonderful opportunities to watch musicals and ballets, the DFs for working around the clock for us, CIPE for fulfilling my dreams to study in Korea, Austin for salmon-curing adventures, the Shiok Shack team for being a merry lot to work with, and the awesome class of 2017/2018 for your spontaneity that allowed events like La La Luna and Unweave – and of course for your irreplaceable company that I will miss sorely over summer! – Charlotte I’d like to thank the library staff. They gave me invaluable help when I was trying to write my paper, even thinking ahead of me in terms of providing relevant research materials and sources. I’m also glad to see our growing collection of books. The academic life was made a lot easier by them. Very grateful! – Yihao
APPRECIATION CORNER
I would like to thank all the amazing CIPE staff for pushing every student to reach beyond their boundaries and helping them reevaluate their potential! Through CIPE opportunities, I have grown as a person, discovered more about the world, and experienced many memorable moments that I would like to carry into the future. – Florence
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ELECTIVES AND MAJORS FAIR 2014
“I really enjoyed reading Diary of a Madman this semester, so I can’t wait to see what else modern Chinese literature has to offer me. And we get to go to Beijing with Prof Liu! That totally sealed the deal for me. I also really want to go to Spain next summer for a language exchange program, so I guess it’s about time I really sit down and brush up my Spanish.” –Hoa
“I’ve chosen to take Understanding Behavior and Cognition and Introduction to International Relations with Integrative Music Theory as an overload next semester. The Psychology course that I’ve been patiently waiting for is finally here! I’ve flipped through random books on the subject and taken short courses online but none of them are as comprehensive as a proper introductory college-level class. I’m not entirely sure what will be taught in Intro to IR, but I really liked PPT last semester and am toying with the idea of a minor in Political Science. Music Theory is probably my most exciting class. It’s great playing music But I’ve always wished I could formally think about music in a nonperformance setting.” - Theodore “I’m choosing International Relations and Environmental Studies. I am excited about merging western and eastern schools of thought in IR theory. Given the shifting of power to Asia in the next few decades, I am excited with the fact that new perspectives combining both western and eastern thought are becoming increasingly pertinent. Particularly, my interests in IR lie in South East Asia. I did my Senior High/ J2 thesis on Cross Strait Relations and am very interested in how the dynamics between China and SEA play out – the SEA backyard theory.” - Sheryl
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“I’m choosing the Intro to International Relations and the Religions of Abraham modules. In addition, I am thinking of continuing with Spanish II. I’m very excited to take the IR course as this is the gateway course to global affairs – which I see as my future major. I am also very excited for Religions of Abraham as I have always been intrigued with the history of these three religions and never had the opportunity to study it formally.” –Jared
“I’m thinking of taking Masterpieces of Western Art and Introduction to Math Logic. I’m really passionate about studying art (once again, yes I am predictable). I’m not an expert on art theory (especially around here since so many people are so well-read) but art isn’t confined to the 4 borders of a canvas and I’m really excited to know more about how it trickles down and saturates culture.” - Natalie
All photo credits to Melody
Toastmasters Club is a club that helps people to improve their communication and leadership skills. This is done through the delivery of prepared, impromptu, and evaluation speeches, as well as the rotation of roles during each session such as toastmaster, grammarian, general evaluator, topics master etc. Toastmasters Club can help you improve your public speaking and reduce stage fright as you practice delivering different kinds of speeches to an audience. It can also help you in improving your ability to answer impromptu questions in a coherent manner. Toastmasters Club aims to make public speaking fun, easy and enjoyable to its members. Club sessions are fun and engaging, so do join our sessions if you are interested! Contact Valerie at 96546525 for more information. 4