Leaving a legacy on the Yale-NUS community

After bidding farewell to Yale-NUS College, many from the Class of 2024 reflected on the projects and communities that encompassed their College experience. From organising school-wide events, running student leadership bodies to building organisations with students from NUS College, these four years have been challenging yet vibrant for many of our alumni. What will they remember from these unique experiences?

Many of the Yale-NUS community think of Brewhouse as a significant part of their College life — Brewhouse is a volunteer-run café that serves students their crucial morning perk-up every day of the semester, rain or shine. To Loo Jing Xuan (Class of 2024), co-manager of Brewhouse in Academic Year 2023/2024, leading the team was an important mission in her final year.

This year in particular was a tricky one for the team, with a smaller cohort remaining and the transition from their cart-service to a new physical space in Agora (more about it in this previous article, “Brewhouse moves to a new space at Agora”).

“Securing the larger space of Agora was a form of ‘upscaling’. However, the decreasing population has made it difficult to sustain our operations,” Jing Xuan shared. In response, they welcomed and trained more baristas from NUS College, while more senior Yale-NUS baristas pulled double shifts when needed to sustain their five-day week operations.

“Since Brewhouse has been such a staple to many of our regulars and baristas — within our capacity, we didn’t want anyone waking up disappointed or starting their day feeling like a part of their routine is missing,” she explained.

Maintaining traditions at the College is a driving force for others as well. Nick Gill is another Class of 2024 alumnus whose work with Bread and Jam was deeply motivated by the determination to continue Yale-NUS traditions. Bread and Jam is an annual gig event featuring students (and this year, faculty) bands performing staple songs (the “bread”) as well as songs unique to each bands’ styles (the “jam”).

“Organising Bread and Jam was remarkable for me because of how impactful it has been for the music community in this school,” Nick reminisced. While the other music events are either more massive or intimate in scale, Bread and Jam is a good middle ground that gives musicians a chance to perform in front of a smaller crowd. “This is a critical part of building confidence and sharing music with the wider Yale-NUS community,” he said.

Tapping onto his experience organising Bread and Jam in 2022, Nick took on the role of heading the organising team in 2023, which was a significant leadership experience for him. “It was challenging organising an undertaking of this scale: communicating across bands, the Makerspaces, Initiatives, Community, Exhibitions (MICE) team, Student Affairs Office, and merchandise suppliers was no easy task.” Nick is grateful for the dedicated team which pulled them through each challenge. “My favourite part of the experience was watching everything come together so organically in the end,” he expressed.

Interacting across different communities could be challenging but also deeply rewarding. Billy Tran (Class of 2024) took on roles as Vice-President of Campus Life in Student Government (StuGov) and Vice-President of Elm College Council (ECC), and enjoyed working with various stakeholders in the Yale-NUS community, whom he may not have interacted with otherwise. One incident that struck him was during his time in ECC was meeting representatives from Sodexo, the Dining Hall food vendor at that time, to discuss the menu for the Start-of-Semester Dinner.

“Before that meeting, they seemed like a faceless organisation. But as we all excitedly pitched menu items at that meeting, it was really special,” he shared. “This made me realise that it’s always worthwhile to sit down and talk to people: you’ll never know what you can learn about and from them!”

What was most meaningful to him about his leadership work on campus was the opportunity to create spaces where people’s voices could be expressed and heard. This occurred in StuGov meetings with the school administration and through organising town halls. “Town halls were not always the most elegant, but organising these big events allowing the community to gather and always felt impactful,” he said.

His participation in the NUS College Student Life Working Group allowed him to create spaces for our community to give their feedback on various aspects like Pastoral Care and Orientation. From one-on-one meetings to focus group discussions, they then collated all this data to present to the Working Group. “I recognised the position I had as a student leader and sought to use that for the betterment of my community,” he reflected.

As the Class of 2024 graduated from the College, they take with them important lessons for their next phase of life. “I’m much more confident after my student leadership experiences at Yale-NUS,” Billy said. “With this experience of working with all these amazing communities, I want to carry this ideology of building supportive teams into my future workplace.”