Please donate blood

Singapore has a relatively low voluntary blood donation rate because many people are apathetic, afraid of blood, ineligible for various health reasons, etc. Blood stocks tend to be low at the end of the year and there will probably be a public call for more blood donors soon.

I've been a regular blood donor since my undergraduate days in NUS and will encourage you to be one. If you are an NUS student or staff, it is very convenient to donate blood. Just head to the NUH blood donation centre which is next door.

The Kent Ridge Common

I must say that I am impressed by this new independent student daily from the National University of Singapore. I wish I had something like this to read during my time in NUS. As an undergraduate in NUS many years ago, I found the student publication like The Ridge to be feeble and boring. Instead of addressing pertinent issues like scholarships for foreigners, ways to improve undergraduate science education and NS service obligations for undergraduates, The Ridge, which I only read very occasionally, would concern itself with mundane issues like the allocation of ECA points or the frequency of shuttle buses. Most of my classmates did not even realize that The Ridge existed as it was largely irrelevant to their university lives. The Kent Ridge Commons is refreshingly different.

I'm definitely subscribing to its RSS feed.

Bond breakers

A couple of months ago, I was asked by a professor J in the office building to review the credentials of a graduate school applicant X from my alma mater, the National University of Singapore. X is a 4th year Electrical and Computer Engineering student and should have completed his studies by now. Prof. J handed me the dossier file containing X's application materials - his transcript, resume, statement, recommendation letters, etc. I went through all of them. His application was pretty solid. Straight A's in his engineering classes according to his transcript. Top 5 in his cohort, said one of his professors in his recommendation letters. I don't even know why Prof. J asked me to look over his application.

Then, I noticed that X was from the PRC. More specifically, X is an MOE scholarship holder (as stated in his resume), the kind that is obliged to serve out his/her bond in Singapore for 6 years after graduation in exchange for a tax-money sponsored university education in Singapore. What on earth was he doing, applying to go to graduate school in the US immediately after graduation when he has signed a 6-year contract with the MOE? As far as I know, the bond does not allow its signee to undertake any postgraduate studies overseas unless he/she obtains Singapore citizenship. If the ECE department accepts X's application, there is no way they will defer his entry for 6 years. So, the only logical conclusion is that X is going to break his bond and come to the US for graduate school. Applying to graduate school is not cheap and something you do on a whim as it involves doing the GRE, TOEFl and getting people to write recommendation letters.

The irony is, for people like X who will probably 'break' his bond and mind you, not fulfill the terms of his contract, i.e. not pay the financial penalty of not serving out his bond, the Singapore government will stay silent, very very silent. By letting someone like X go, at least 100 to 150 thousand dollars of Singaporeans' tax money spent subsidizing his eduction has gone down the drain. Where is the accountability so often trumpeted by our civil service?

On the other hand, in contrast, when one of our PSC/EDB scholars does not serve out his/her bond but pays back the money to the government, plus a little bit more, the national broadsheets scream bloody murder and an esteemed, very senior civil servant, who is more likely than not to be aware of MOE scholarships for people like X, threatens to award scholarships only to females and foreigners because they are supposedly less likely to break their bonds. (Guess what? Someone in this university, who used to be an undergraduate scholarship holder from the organization formerly chaired by the aforementioned civil servant, is a female non-Singaporean bond-breaker.) We have to bear in mind that the government is financially compensated in this case and terms of the contract are indeed fulfilled to the letter, whereas for people like X, there is a clear monetary loss.

The hypocrisy of it all...

ST: It's S'pore's gain even if 30-40% of immigrants settle here: MM Lee

This recent Straits Times article caught my eye. The MM said that it is Singapore's gain even if 30 to 40 percent of immigrants settle here. He also acknowledged that many PRC and India students use Singapore as a stepping stone to the West. Well, it certainly took him some time to catch on to what most ordinary Singaporeans have known for a long time.

I was back in Singapore a couple of weeks ago. Feeling nostalgic, I took out my copy of Commencement 2004, which stated who graduated with what degree in 2004 from NUS. As I thumbed through the pages of the booklet, I saw that majority of the first class honours graduates from the Engineering and Science faculties had very Chinese Singaporean surnames (Lim, Tan, Teo, etc). Mind you, these faculties are where the PRC and India scholars are concentrated. Also, first class honours are usually given to the top 3 to 10 percent of the cohort (depending on the specific course of study).

Given that foreign students make up 20 percent of the NUS undergraduate body, you should expect PRC and India scholars in the Engineering and Science faculties to be grabbing the majority share of the top honours. After all, we are told that for every one local undergraduate on scholarship studying in a university in Singapore, we have two foreign undergraduates also on scholarship. Surely, it would not be unreasonable to expect our foreign undergraduate scholars perform academically. If undergraduate scholarships are given out on the basis of pure academic merit, then we should expect the ratio of foreign to local first class holders to be 2 to 1. Yet, this is not even true in the faculties in which the foreign students are concentrated.

This clearly demonstrates the strong anti-local bias in our foreign talent policy. Good local students, who study the same subjects as equally able foreign students, are given much less financial incentives to enroll in our local universities, unlike their foreign counterparts. What more can I say?