About Me:

I am Haolie and I’ve lived in Singapore all my life. Global Affairs came as a natural choice for its warm community of incredibly supportive and committed faculty and peers, and the incredible breadth and flexibility of its offerings that has altogether broadened my intellectual horizons in profound ways. The varied but yet incisive intersections of academic fields that I’ve come to benefit from GA has also bled into my work outside the class in civil society: apart from my work outside campus, I was a founding member of CAPE, Fossil Free Yale-NUS, and the Student Government Senate. In my time at Yale-NUS, I’ve had plentiful international experiences – interning at a waste management start-up in Myanmar; studying social movements across the Deep South of the US, Jordan, and Nepal; backpacking solo through the Middle East; studying the Arab Spring and Israel-Palestine conflict; and, exploring biodiversity and conservation work in the Himalayas. I also enjoy kayaking, reading, and brewing beer.

Research Interests:

My research interests are authoritarianism and democracy studies, labour migration, political economy, human rights and social movements, international development, and with an area interests in East and Southeast Asia. My capstone investigated identity and vulnerabilities engendered by state Sinicisation of elite bicultural Chinese Singaporeans amidst great power competition.

(Haolie’s capstone, “Singapore’s Bicultural Huaren Elite: Vulnerabilities and Attitudinal Effects of State Sinicisation Programmes,” won the 2021 Global Affairs Capstone Prize.)

About Me:

I am raised in South Korea and China. I love learning languages, meeting new people, and traveling! While in Yale-NUS, I had the great privilege to join study abroad programs in six different countries to learn about, from, and with different displaced populations around the world. Outside class, I usually spend time swimming, watching interior design and architecture videos, doing crafts, and self-learning different languages.

I am academically interested in refugees and forced migration. Thanks to the Global Affairs major at Yale-NUS, I have acquired an interdisciplinary perspective and strong research skills to study this complex global issue. I find it fascinating (at the same time very difficult) to learn how different societal structures and individuals’ identities can together shape the motivation, process, and outcome of the forced migration journey. Also, as an Anthropology minor, I am committed to always including the voices and experiences of refugees themselves in the study of forced migration.

Research Interests:

My capstone thesis explored the political significance of refugee self-representation in global governance conferences. In the long-term, I want to work as a policy consultant to help Asian states develop sustainable and participatory refugee protection programs.

About Me:

I’m Seung Hee and I am from South Korea. I was born in South Korea, but mostly raised in Indonesia. I lived in Jakarta for 12 years prior to joining Yale-NUS College in 2014. I initially started off my academic career with a strong focus in biochemical and physical sciences, but the liberal arts program at Yale-NUS has offered me to think otherwise. As a Global Affairs major, I was mainly interested in examining the role of global corporations in a world that is becoming increasingly more compressed yet ever more dynamic. This academic focus led me to engage with corporate opportunities around the world, the most recent one being in Osaka, Japan, whereby I participated as an intern to devise strategies for global talent acquisition and develop training schemes to allow employees to better engage with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) goals.

I currently speak four different languages– Korean, English, Spanish, and Indonesian– which I owe to the privilege of being brought up in a diverse cultural setting. Outside of class, my main interest lies in golf, which I took to joining the Yale Men’s Club Golf Team during my semester of exchange at Yale.

Research Interests:

My main research interest lies in examining how corporations can influence the political affairs of a given country, such as in crafting policy outcomes and governing elections. I specifically addressed this question in the context of South Korea in my capstone project, where I sought to examine how political endorsement by South Korean Chaebols may motivate a change in the public’s voting behavior.

(Seung Hee’s capstone, “Examining the Effect of Chaebol Endorsement on Voting Behavior in South Korea,” won the 2020 Global Affairs Capstone Prize.)

About Me:

I am Qinyi, born and raised in sunny Singapore. I am interested in identity politics, transnational issues and public and foreign policy of Singapore and the Southeast Asian region. I feel a deep sense of connection to Singapore and aspire towards a career in the Public Service. Outside of academics, my college life involves being a part of the NUS Chinese Orchestra, skateboarding to 24-hour convenience stores in search of supper and occasionally training with the Yale-NUS Floorball team. I feel empowered by late-night conversations on current affairs with friends who are equally passionate about the state of our world, powerfully emotional rock music and good mentaiko dishes.

Research Interests:

My capstone research conceptualised populism in the Southeast Asian context and operationalised this understanding of populism in the study of foreign policy responses towards territorial disputes. This research embraced the salience of populism beyond the Euro-Americas and introduced an inward-looking, domestic perspective in explaining a country’s reaction towards territorial disputes.

About Me:

My name is Helena Auerswald, and I am from the United States. I grew up in Washington D.C., where I was surrounded by the constant motion of politics, activism, and diplomacy. Eager to gain a new perspective on these fascinating—but occasionally narrow-minded—fields, I chose to move to Singapore to attend Yale-NUS. At YNC, I worked as a Peer Tutor in the Writers’ Centre, a member of the CIPE Student Advisory Council, and a cyclist in the school’s Cycling Club. I also enjoyed taking time off campus to attend events and lectures held by other universities and organizations around the city, and to explore the diverse food and wildlife Singapore has to offer. Academically, Global Affairs was my intended major from day one, because it allowed for an interdisciplinary study of the forces that shape our world order, including historical contexts, diplomatic relations, cultural diversity, and more.

Research Interests:

My research interests include U.S. security strategy, the sources and effects of identity politics, and how these two fields impact one another. After taking the course U.S. Foreign Policy in my second year, I came to realize that as an American who hopes to someday represent my country, I had two primary responsibilities to fulfil while at Yale-NUS: first, to try to understand and analyse the actions of my country through the eyes of foreign governments and citizens, and second, to try to objectively analyse the actions of other countries, particularly as they relate to the U.S. Though simple, both these tasks required dispensing of the biases that I had grown up with all my life in the U.S. After graduating from Yale-NUS, I moved to China to pursue a Master’s in Global Affairs at Peking University on a Yenching Scholarship.

About Me:

My name is Vivek Ganesh and I am a Singaporean. I am quite interested in the intersectionality of international law and ethnic sectarianism, this being born out of years of debating these issues in the Singaporean debating circuit. I am also quite an avid cinephile, and have always been very involved in critical film theory and have contributed my own reviews to local film magazines. I have a soft spot for old movies, constantly breaking in lines from Casablanca into regular conversation and it is a dream of mine to one day film a documentary covering ethnic conflict around the world. I also dabble in poetry especially exploring the notion of love and romanticism in countries with high dissidence cultures.

Research Interests:

My Capstone research looked at the efficacy of using coalition forces as conflict mitigators or responders to war torn regions and how the curation of such forces through international mechanism or their internal structure could impede the completion of mission objectives due to the exercise of personal political agendas. I am particularly interested in the Middle East due to my taking a class that explored the notion of gender/identity politics and ethnic sectarianism in Arab literature. After graduating from Yale-NUS, I joined Transparency International’s Bangkok Office as a research analyst in the Research and Knowledge division. I am tasked with conducting research and compiling data on polity indices and collaborating with human rights organizations affiliated with the Transparency International chapters in the Asia-Pacific.

About Me:

My name is Tamara Burgos and I am from Bolivia. After Yale-NUS, I pursued a Masters degree in Management at Warwick Business School. My major in Global Affairs has been fundamental in broadening my perspective and understanding the different ways in which the world is interconnected. As an undergraduate at Yale-NUS, I worked as a security analyst at the Organization of American States and as a marketing and business analyst at firms in Singapore and Bolivia. These experiences coupled with my education at YNC shaped my interest in working at the intersection of business and GA; I’m particularly interested in the effect of geopolitical factors in the finance industry. I speak Spanish, French, German, and am learning Chinese. In my free time, I practice contemporary ballet and yoga, devour books, and fill my sketch pads with drawings.

Research Interests:

Gender inequality is one of the most important challenges to overcome in the 21st Century. In the context of labour markets, women face a number of cultural and structural obstacles as companies make unfair decisions regarding hiring practices, benefits, and opportunities for career development on the basis of gender. As means to tackle this issue, several European countries introduced corporate gender quota policies that resulted in vastly different levels of regulatory compliance across states. My capstone project focused on studying the effect of corporate gender quota policies in France, Italy, and Spain. I analysed the role of variables like enforcement mechanisms and government persuasion in defining the outcomes of the quota policies.

About Me:

I am Joshua Leung from Singapore. I have an interest in politics and international relations. Three things draw me to this field. Firstly, the fact that states largely have a monopoly on the use of force. As such, our peace and security is almost entirely contingent on the friendly or unfriendly interactions between states. On a related note, the greatest human suffering comes from wars and the primary force that either prevents or propagates conflicts are state-to-state relations and tensions. Finally, I firmly believe that state cooperation is necessary in order to solve humanity’s greatest problems such as poverty, world hunger, climate change and transnational crime.

Research Interests:

My research interest is on how culture and social-psychology can impact the decision-making calculus of state leaders and how these concepts interplay with material power to affect state behaviour and outcomes of interactions. I am particularly interested in examining how appealing or offending the cultural norms and expectations of another state would impact that state’s cooperativeness or aggressiveness. After Yale-NUS, I pursued a PhD in Political Science at the University of Southern California.

(Joshua’s capstone, “The Cybernetics Model and Status Seeking Strategies in China,” won the 2018 Tan Ming Seng Prize for Chinese Studies.)

About Me:

I am Mollie Saltskog from Stockholm, Sweden. I have an academic and professional interest in International Security, focused on geopolitics and non-state actors in the Middle East. During my senior year at Yale-NUS, I was selected in the second class of the Schwarzman Scholars Program, an elite global scholarship designed to prepare the next generations of global leaders – with an acceptance rate of less than 5%. As a Schwarzman Scholar I pursued a Master’s Degree in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. During my free time, I am a keen tennis player, an avid reader of fantasy literature, and a passionate animal welfare advocate.

My Capstone Project:

My capstone investigated al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (JN)/Jabhat Fateh al-Sham/ Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and challenges the conventional theory of splintering as a way terrorist organizations can end. In my research, I found that the official splintering between al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra had not diminished but dramatically enhanced the affiliate’s operational capability (a terrorist organization’s capability to carry out terrorist tactics). The research provided a framework for how to evaluate future splintering in the al-Qaeda organization, which may become a new strategy for the global terror network given the positive effects on its Syrian affiliate.

About Me:

My name is Joey, and I hail from the San Francisco Bay Area. My two academic interests include Global Women’s Health and Art History. Outside of academics, my passion is dance. I have trained in ballet, jazz, and modern for the past 16 years and have had the opportunity to travel globally for performances, including London for the 2012 Olympics and Milan for the 2015 World’s Fair. After completing my undergraduate degree at Yale-NUS, I completed a Master’s of Public Health at Yale University with a concentration in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. I now work as a data analyst with the Policy, Planning and Evaluation unit within First Five Alameda, a local NGO outside of Oakland, California, that focuses on developing prevention and early intervention systems to promote the health and development of children between the ages of 0 and 5 in Alameda County.

My Capstone Project:

While at Yale-NUS, I studied the menstrual stigma that remains pervasive in many societies, leading to alarming and adverse outcomes among the women and girls directly implicated. My capstone looked at one dimension of the menstrual stigma, exploring the research question: Is there a correlation between menstrual hygiene management and female net secondary school rates? I attempted to utilize a quantitative methodology in an area typically dominated by qualitative studies in the hopes of providing a technique that could potentially be utilized in other settings.