Thoughts on NUS

As of press time I have one major math chapter to revise (being already lost, despite it being only the 3rd week of school) and a programming assignment to complete, and so I really shouldn't be sitting down with my mind switched on write and my browser opened to Blogger. But no matter. I'm setting aside Friday nights as writing time, and the weather is cool and the skies are grey this evening (plus there's the small matter of having just woken from a fantastic 1 hour nap) and so write I shall. The following are a collection of my thoughts on NUS.

The National University of Singapore, placed 30th in the world and home to a combined student population of about 29,305 (with the international student body at 34%, or 9880) is old and new and beautiful and scattered atop what feels like the hilliest bloody place on the whole island-nation of Singapore.^[1] The Engineering faculty, for instance, is built on a slope, and apart from the rising greens and the shady trees that lead up to its buildings (of which that green rise is admittedly beautiful and possibly the only good thing about aforementioned slope) suffers from the chronic idiosyncrasy of having different floors on different blocks that are linked to each other via suspended walkways, and so - as Tay describes it: ".. bloody confusing wan! When you call somebody and they say they're on the seventh floor, you have to ask them which block they're in, because the sixth floor on some block is the seventh floor on another block ..." and so when people from other faculties so dare to venture into the engineering department they very often get lost.



But NUS is itself old, and the buildings themselves come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I would be hard-pressed to find a unifying word to describe the whole of campus: Hodgepodge, perhaps. Or Stoned. The newer buildings are fantastic glass and steel structures of modern design and build (i.e: the University Hall, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music), but the older ones look like a slightly brighter more academic version of Civic Centre/Hopoh (read: nostalgic, or old or, less kind, this: ugly), with small, glazed-white tiles on the walls and brown slats underfoot and dusty metal-framed picture windows that you see only in half-empty barbershops in Old Kuching. The gardens are beautiful. The sculptures are breathtaking and clever and mostly relevant to whichever faculty or portion of campus you find them in ^[2], and the trees are large and shady and inviting, like you have to sit under them and read a book, or have a picnic, or something.



The student body in NUS is diverse, and I have met more people from more places around the world in the past one month then I have in all my life in Kuching. We have Mauritians and Indians, Koreans and PRC Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Burmese and Scottish and German and Dutch, and they all mostly stick to their own skin profiles i.e.: the Whites stick together and go out clubbing on weekends, the Indians move around in groups (always in groups) and the PRC Chinese walk around in twos and threes, like they're sick of close-proximity groupthink or something. And so it's quite weird to see a Chinese boy sitting with a group of Indians during dinner - which is what I do, and they all bombard me with questions like "what is the meaning of la?" and share with me their stories of home - "the place where I'm from in India is known for two things: tea and terrorists" - and we share with each other the best places to go for Indian food and whether it's authentic or not and how the briyani here is nothing like as compared to back home in wherever.

I've come to realize, though, that friendship in University isn't so much built around your class or where you sit in class as it is around what co-curricular activities you do, or what modules you take for a particular semester. I don't have a close circle of friends; what I do have at the moment more resembles a network than anything else: Hoang, who is a Vietnamese and explains to me complex math concepts in CS1231; Valentino, who is Indonesian and loves lit and sits with me in theatre; Keng Wee and Woong Yong, who are Singaporeans and fellow orientation-group members in 0-week and who now only see each other (and me) on Friday, for 1105, and Shiv and Shailendra and Sudanshu and Chinab and Godham and Sriharsha and countless others who are Indians and are friends because we all love to talk.^[3]

Then there are the friends that I feel most comfortable with, like curling up with a loved book by the fire, and these are mostly the ones I've met in Kuching during sec school. There's Tay and Joash, and Ameline and Val, and Zakil ... and it's meeting Zakil on campus that I find most amazing and cool and compelling a story to relate to you here: It was in the afternoon. I was tired. I was on the NUS internal shuttle bus, and I had my face against the cold relief of the glass windows, eyes shut, when I heard Zakil's voice. Now I've known Zakil since Form 2 - we went to tuition together - and the imagined reality of hearing an old friend's voice while on the bus back to my room in NUS is like finding a snowflake in Indonesia while on the way to milk your cows. Zakil is here for Medicine, and we've explored vast portions of NUS together already ... finding - amongst other things - military labs and aquariums filled with exotic fish and viral research centres tucked away deep in the bowels of the university campus.



Studying in NUS is again quite different from what you'd expect it to be. Disregard the top-30 world ranking and understand that NUS is a research hub ... and academicians actually flock here for the funding and support provided by the Singaporean government. The one condition that they have is that they are forced to teach. This means that while you have access to what are arguably the top minds in this part of the world (and beyond, even), you more often than not have men and women who are better suited for research than they are for teaching. I can't confirm this: all my teachers this first semester are wonderful. My seniors in the School of Computing, however, complain that their modules are dry and boring, and that - while professionally excellent - their professors are far from the ideal teachers they might've asked for. This is a small issue: save America and Oxbridge, I don't think teaching excellence and world class research can be found in that many universities in this part of the world, though not for reasons that I pretend to understand. ^[4]

But it's a curious fact that rankings and meta-critical thought about rankings disappear when you're finally here and attending lectures in the university itself: nobody really cares what NUS is ranked as on the world stage, and Singaporeans never really pay lip-service to this fact. To the average Singaporean, NUS is where you go to if you're bright but you can't afford Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/MIT, and the well-to-do Singaporean's attitude towards local universities bear a certain shadowy resemblance to the way upper-middle-class Malaysians treat our own local public universities. I can only guess at this: I suppose when you take for granted what is readily available to you, you begin to look at bigger things at the expense of local education: like Cambridge Massachusetts, for instance. But I shall not pretend to understand everything about this.

One other thing that I won't pretend to care about: to tell you that all this argument and thought about university ranking actually matters to me, because it does not: university life is oddly fulfilling and challenging and tough, but unlike anything else I've ever experienced before. A bunch of us were lounging around in the cluster corridor a couple of hours ago and the one thing we agreed upon - definitively, that is - was that Form 6 is nothing compared to the first sem of university - or, at least, the first sem of university in NUS. The myth that it is is just that - a myth.

More on that some other day.



^1. An Indian friend of mine, in Engineering, tells me that NUS is aptly named: the National University of Stairs. He isn't kidding. ↩

^2. Except one outside the School of Design and Environment, which looks like a collection of stony spires set out on a small patch of lawn, some of which are collapsed and sad-looking and lying like dead logs on the grass. ↩

^3. Shiv I met in debate, and he's on scholarship in Engineering and very bright and a real pleasure to debate with. ↩

^4. Take all this with a pinch of salt: I don't believe university rankings are the be-all and the end-all of tertiary education, and I don't recommend you do too. For instance, an education in a unranked liberal-arts college in America followed by a professional postgraduate degree is still arguably better than professional training in the best ranked university in Asia. ↩