From Round Square to Full Circle

After 12 years abroad, former Cambodian Scholar Kimheang Chham '16 reflects on her journey as she returns home

Kim attended UWCSEA East Campus from 20112016 as a Scholar from Cambodia. After completing a degree in International Studies, Peace Studies and Sustainable Communities at Luther College in Iowa, Kim recently returned to her home country where she is currently Senior Associate, Development and Communications for Teach for Cambodia, an organisation that works to provide educational opportunities for disadvantaged children.

Kim recently visited East Campus, where we had the opportunity to sit down in Santai Cafe for a conversation about life in small town Iowa, Covid-19 couch surfing in Europe and education and empowerment in Cambodia.

Please tell us a little bit about your UWC experience.

When I first arrived at UWC in Grade 8, I was part of the very first cohort of Cambodian scholars who came to East Campus, and it was such a big change. I had never lived in a big city before, never slept in a bed, never taken a hot shower. I couldn’t understand ninety percent of what people said. It was new and exciting and also quite scary. But I learned, adapted and grew so much in my five years at East. One of my favourite experiences was participating in the IfP (Initiative for Peace programme). I think we only met once a week but it was something I always looked forward to. It was a crosscampus initiative, so we got to meet with students from Dover a few weekends during the year, which was great. When we went to facilitate our own conference, we went to Thailand, and it was an amazing experience. I felt empowered that I could facilitate groups having important conversations with young people, and I saw how this could be used as an effective tool to empower other young people to go back and solve problems in their own communities.

This inspired me to bring this model back home. So when I graduated, I took a gap year, focusing on creating a peace conference in Cambodia. I worked with a group of young Cambodians to create a conference. We recruited UWCSEA students who were part of IfP and wanted to do more outside of school, and they came to facilitate the conference.

We planned everything on our own—it was very student-led and it was a hit. We eventually had a group of students running it every year up until the start of the pandemic. So it kind of happened on its own, which was my dream, to make it sustainable.

After your gap year, you embarked on another big change, flying halfway around the world to a small town in the American Midwest. Tell us about your college experience.

I went to Luther College, a small school in a tiny town in Iowa—around 2,000 students in a town of 7,000. It was very different from living in Singapore, but UWC really prepared me for college life. When I arrived, I knew I wanted to do something more with Peacebuilding and sustainability, so I pursued a degree in International Studies with a focus on Peacebuilding. This was a new track there—no one had ever done it before. So I was able to make my own focus, and took classes related to Peacebuilding.

I went to summer school in California to take additional courses, and a Peace Scholar programme in Norway (unfortunately online as it was during the pandemic). I spent a lot of my time working in Sustainability and International Studies, exploring a lot of other things that I started to gain a vision of what I wanted to do. I also explored fitness and teaching fitness, which was something I never had a chance to do as a girl growing up in Cambodia. I basically did a bunch of exploring when I was there.

And that’s what university is really about, exploring and experimenting, embracing opportunities but also learning how to create your own experiences.

You were in the midst of your college studies when the pandemic hit. How did that affect your experience?

When the pandemic broke, I was actually in Europe doing an exchange semester in Malta. I was there for about six weeks and then the world shut down. All my American friends were able to fly back to the US, but I couldn’t go back because I had to renew my visa. I was stranded in Malta.

So I was like, “OK, who do you know in Europe? Time to use your UWC connections.” So I went to stay with one of my previous teachers from Grade 10, Louisa Radford, who was teaching in Switzerland, and she took me in for three months. I did my studies online, and finished the semester from Louisa’s living room.

After that I went to stay with another friend from UWC in Geneva for another three months because I still couldn’t go back to the U.S. I stayed with an alum from Dover who I had met through Round Square, a networking conference that we had attended together. I was really lucky that I had another UWC connection in Switzerland who invited me to stay.

Eventually I was able to return to the U.S. and finish my studies. When I graduated I went back to Europe to run a UWC short course through the UWC Germany National Committee. It was a really good experience having so many young people from around Europe interested in the UWC Mission. It was really cool to be surrounded by UWC alumni from other parts of the world and talking with young people who hadn’t gone to UWC, but were interested in the same ideals as us.

I always try to expand my UWC network whenever I can. We definitely have an established commonness, even with a lot of diversity, there’s something that binds us. I’ve always felt connected, challenged and welcomed by the UWC community, no matter where I am.

And then after that I returned to Cambodia in the fall of 2022, where I started my current job.

“It’s crazy, all these UWC connections. They’ve happened so many times already since graduating, and I know it’s going to keep happening. And every time it happens, it’s really cool, really special.”

My job title is Senior Associate in Development and Communications at an NGO called Teach for Cambodia, which is trying to address education inequity in Cambodia.

The public school system here has not been able to adequately prepare students for the job market. So we have partnered with the government, bringing our own ways of teaching and programming together with the standardised government curriculum. We recruit recent university graduates to teach in high needs public schools around the country. The students get to learn in a more holistic and empowering way, and we try to include new programmes like digital literacy and financial education. I’m helping with managing external relationships with our donors and also creating stories of impact about the work that we are doing. It’s all very new to me.

I knew I wanted to go into a social impact area, and I was actually connected to Teach for Cambodia by a former teacher of mine from UWC—Louie Barnett—who was my chemistry teacher and also part of IfP. When he found out I was coming back to Cambodia, he connected me with Teach for Cambodia.

Actually, a few weeks ago another crazy UWC connection happened. We were coordinating a project with another international NGO, and the name of the person we were emailing with sounded very familiar. So I did a quick search on LinkedIn and it turns out they were my roommate in Grade 10—a UWC student from Kazakhstan who went to Canada to study. And now they’re working for this NGO that is connected with my NGO in Cambodia!

It’s crazy, all these UWC connections. They’ve happened so many times already since graduating, and I know it’s going to keep happening. And every time it happens, it’s really cool, really special.

You’ve had a fascinating journey since you graduated. How would you say your experience at UWCSEA prepared you?

Two things come to mind. First, UWC taught me to be really adaptable. So whatever new circumstance life happens to throw at me, I know how to deal with it. UWC definitely taught me and other students to know that we are capable, that we have agency, and that no matter what happens, we can be resilient and find creative solutions.

Second, UWC taught me to be a critical thinker. This is not a skill I had before I arrived there. Through college and now in my professional career it is such a necessary skill, it helps me to figure out what I really want to do and what feels right for me and go into any situation having the questions that I need to ask in order to decide, in order to figure out what I’m going to do next.

I definitely bring this into my work now, just assessing every situation from a critical lens. It’s something I’m really grateful for and something that I think makes me stand out too, in work and in moving through different parts of the world on my own. Having that way of questioning and thinking helps me get in touch with what feels true for me.

One thing that seems constant throughout your story is the continuing presence of a UWC network in your life. Some connections you’ve actively sought out, and some have been more serendipitous. How do you see the value of these ongoing UWC connections?

I have to admit I would have been quite scared and maybe decided not to come back home if I didn’t have the UWC network of Cambodian alumni who had also returned. Without them, without the shared understanding of these different ways of thinking, I would be too scared to throw myself back into a place that I left a long time ago. Right now they are my main community back in Cambodia. I’m also now part of the National Committee in Cambodia as well, helping to find new students to attend UWC.

It’s never really left me and I feel like I find myself in situations with UWC people all the time, both personally and professionally. Without it, I mean especially during Covid-19, I don’t know what I would have done in Europe.

So that community, either back home or internationally, is very important. We have this thing, kind of an unspoken thing, that when we’re in a space with other UWC people, we just know that we feel safe, and that we have an understanding with one another.

And I know that wherever I go in the world, I always have that UWC community too.

I attended UWCSEA from 1998–2009 as part of a family of UWCers; my mother and father both attended in the ’80s, as did most of my father’s family. I graduated from Dover in 2009, with an interest in teaching, music and sciences, but without a specific career in mind. All I knew was that I wanted to make a positive impact for those in greatest need.

I went on to study medicine at King’s College London, graduating in 2014, and started ophthalmic specialty training in 2016. I am currently a senior registrar undertaking a higher research degree back at King’s College, focusing on my thesis—a clinical study evaluating novel methods of screening for hydroxychloroquine retinopathy.

I currently serve in a variety of other roles, both in London and further afield including a tutor for various ophthalmic and general specialist teaching groups; a violinist and chamber musician; and a volunteer at Restart Lives London, a homeless shelter. I also spend time as a clinical advisor to charities running eye hospitals in Republic of Congo, Myanmar and South India including New Sight Congo (set up by another UWC alum from Red Cross