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MNEMOZINE
INTERVIEW/ PROF DUBOIS Professor Thomas DuBois has been teaching History in NUS for 8 years and he will be leaving for Australia at the end of the year. Our interviewer, Joshua Ho took some time to get to know more about the man.
josh Would you mind providing a bit of your personal background to begin with? prof I’m from Indiana, which is in the Midwestern USA and I grew up in what you could call the Chicago suburbs. I was not a particularly good student until I went to university. One of the things I always tell my students here is that had I been brought up in Singapore, I would be driving a taxi right now because I was really just an OK student for most of my teens. My interests were not in school – it was in girls and water skiing and other stuff like that. Especially girls – you could say I was pretty focused. When I got to college, there were a lot more opportunities and I started studying Russian which was very interesting. I started off at a school that was ok, but not great. I did really well there, and then transferred to the University of Chicago. When I got to Chicago, I had the opportunity to start studying Chinese and once I got pointed in that direction, I never looked back. I was hooked on Asian studies and Chinese language. josh How did you stumble upon this in the first place? prof The real moment was between my first two years at college. I had a friend from high school who was from Taiwan and he invited me to his house in Taipei during the summer of 89. I was already interested in China, but to get to spend a summer in Taipei, it was an eye-opener. josh Why did you choose to become a professor? prof The University of Chicago is a very academically oriented undergrad education and a lot of their undergrads go on to grad school, specifically to get a PhD. There was a lot of support for that kind of career track and I really did idealize the life of a professor. However, in between completing my degree and actually getting the PhD, I went to China for a few years and taught English; I had a moment to