Give that man a Tiger

I was chatting with my boss the other day during lunch. His route to academia is rather unusual.

As an undergraduate, he went to a lesser-known public university because it was near home and his working-class family was poor. The 70s was a difficult time for many working-class families especially when factories were closing down in the US and blue-collar jobs were outsourced, ironically, to places like Singapore. The first time he had steak was after he had left home to attend college. In college, he survived on two dollars a day - 40 cents for a can of peas, 75 cents for a can of tuna and the rest on rice and pasta - so that he didn't have to work during the regular semester and could concentrate fully on studying. He worked fulltime in summer to pay for his expenses. He did say something about joining a fraternity though. People with his family background and gifts usually don't think about taking up a major in a dangerously unremunerative field, much less go to grad school. At least, a Singaporean of that background wouldn't go down that road.

After he got his basic degree, he stayed on in the same university to finish his PhD for family reasons and got his PhD in 3.5 years, followed by a very productive postdoctoral stint in Britain before he moved to a respectable national lab on the west coast where he stayed for 10 years. Most people in his shoes wouldn't think about going into academia, much less one in a competitive top-tier research university, especially when they are free to stay in a research environment where funding is not a problem and life is less hectic. Oh, the weather is a hell lot nicer on the west coast.

After 10 years in the national lab, he moved to a top-tier research public university in rural central Illinois (i.e. middle of nowhere) to be an assistant professor, essentially working his way up the ranks. Today, he's an APS fellow, a full professor with appointments in three departments, two of which are ranked in the top 3 in their fields and a top honcho in his research specialty. And he still finds time to coach his son's little league team.

Frankly, I find that amazing and inspirational. I believe that, very often, people, especially I, are only held back by their insecurities and their lack of achievements are only a consequence of the unwillingness to look past the hand that fate has dealt them and move on to achieve greater things. Everyone has dreams. It's a matter of whether we dare to believe in them or not.

I must work harder. Bloody harder.

GEP is no more

MOE has decided to close down the GEP in secondary schools although the programme will still be run in at the primary school level.

Although it has been more than a decade since I left the programme which was conducted in a premier secondary school in the Bishan-Ang Mo Kio area, I still remember my days in the GEP with some fondness. Back then, the GEP was a highly exclusive (i.e. elitist) programme which only admitted about 0.4 percent (~200) of each cohort. Strangely, during my time, the sex ratio in the GEP was highly skewed with the number of males outnumbering the number of females by a ratio of two to one.

Looking back, I find the GEP curriculum to be of no more use to me than the express-stream curriculum is of use to the average express-stream student. We sure had a lot of enrichment programmes, which I did and still do not appreciate, and plenty of academic projects in the humanities and the sciences to take up our time. In retrospect, I would say that those projects probably did not play a very formative role in my intellectual development since I had neither the academic inclination nor the maturity to take advantage of them; I was too preoccupied with other things that adolescents of that age were usually preoccupied with at that time, perhaps considerably more so than many of my peers in the programme. A consequence of that style of education was that I was put off serious academic/intellectual endeavours for most of my adolescent years. Things only changed after JC...

Although the curriculum had no effect on me, being in a programme surrounded by many very smart people had a tremendous influence on me. It was only after I had left the programme, when I joined the premier pre-university institution in the Ghim Moh area that I realised how intellectually capable most of my peers in secondary school were, even compared to the average student in the institution. Having classmates like them meant that everyone had to share a smaller academic pie and people like me had to know my place. It was discouraging most of the times. Of course, the upside to it was that one got accustomed to a very high level of academic competition really quickly.

In the programme, we took for granted that everyone had a certain level of intellectual competence. It was no joke to sit in class side by side with people who would go on to top their classes in MIT or to win the only Math Olympiad gold medal for Singapore; it was a humbling experience. Like a good number of my peers in the programme, I believed that I was just stupid and not cut out for academic endeavours because I had to struggle to keep up with many of my classmates and was plain beaten. I don't think I have ever faced that sort of struggle to keep up even in grad school where I know people who come from Peking University, USTC, Cambridge, MIT, MIPT, etc. Then again, things were so different back then that a useful comparison cannot be made...

Another consequence of being in the GEP environment was that I learned to be quite independent and methodical in my approach towards learning something, out of sheer necessity to cope with the quicker people around me. In the GEP, independent learning was encouraged and most people could pick up things quite easily. I remember struggling to learn what a function and a Cartesian plot were in secondary one for a group project in math by reading it up from a textbook in the library. Some of the extra things we learned in class in lower secondary were quite delightful although most of them were over my head back then; I recall being introduced to basic probability concepts, matrices, injections, surjections and bijections, sets, etc.

One disadvantage of the GEP environment is that rote work was discouraged. The volume of homework in the GEP was somewhat smaller than that of homework in the express stream. I think the idea behind the reduced homework load was that 'normal' homework was less useful than doing projects and enrichment work for people in the GEP. Tests and exams were sometimes seen as a gauge of a person's brilliance and not as a measure of a person's to mastery some a certain content. I certainly had no self-discipline to sit down and to do the prescribed exercises, having soaked in the very much anti-work ethos. That, of course, changed later on.

As a result, I knew people who never got around to developing the disciplined capacity for the steady plodding work. It was a pity because I knew my share of brilliant people who could have profited from a more disciplined and systematic approach. I had a classmate in university who was also from the GEP but flopped his degee course because he was less than motivated to do his work. As a result, he ended up with a suboptimal honours class. In fact, a good number of GEP people whom I knew in NUS did not do well in their degree course. A lesson that I learned very early, outside of the GEP, was that an intelligent mind not properly supplemented by regular practice quickly loses its ability to work at a higher level. My only regret is that I never got to learn that lesson earlier during my school days.

Being in the GEP had its pros and cons. Overall, it was a positive experience although there were things that I had to unlearn as a result of being in the programme.

Invitation to meet PSC officials

Another great benefit to studying overseas, as opposed to studying locally, is that PSC officials from Singapore will go over to your university to let the Singaporean students, in their own words, 'learn more about new initiatives and opportunities available in the Singapore Civil Service'. They will even throw in a free lunch. Thus, I have conspired with a fellow Singaporean grad student to go enjoy the free food. The only problem is that I can't find my flip-flops and it will be too cold to wear bermudas to the lunch...

Also, Singapore banks - DBS, Standard Chartered, HSBC, etc - are trying to recruit students and working professionals in the US. The recruitment sessions are going to be held in posh places like a Hilton hotel as well as at selected campuses. That's another compelling reason why Singaporeans with the ability to leave should consider exiting the country - the country values you more when you're not in the country. I wonder if I would have even known of such things if I had not left Singapore then.

Lest we forget

Something does not add up

Taken from the CNA article More jobs go to Singaporeans during good and bad times: MM Lee.

Max Lim, General Secretary, Singapore Bank Employees' Union, said: "Some of them are concerned, that they have to compete with more foreign workers, what if the day comes when there are not enough jobs to go around for everybody?"

MM Lee replied that in many retrenchments, the largest numbers affected were foreign workers, and when the jobs came back, the majority of them were taken by locals.

Wait a minute. If the foreign workers are the largest number affected in many retrenchments and the majority of the new jobs go to Singaporeans, then won't we see an increase in the proportion of locals in the Singapore workforce?

Notice how Max Lim's question was not answered directly in the article.