Hey everyone! My name is Jonathan. I am currently a MS Software Management graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California after having just graduated (Class of 2021) from Yale-NUS with an MCS Major and a Chinese Studies Minor. I came to Yale-NUS because I wanted to interdisciplinarily integrate different specialties with my MCS studies. This is why I chose to pursue a Software Management graduate degree here in the rich start-up ecosystem of the Bay Area, where I am currently on the lookout for a cutting-edge tech product which I could steer towards tangible social impact!

I graduated in 2019 with a major in MCS. Although I started freshman year as an intended PPE major, my interest in MCS took off after my experience in Professor Aquinas Hobor’s Introduction to Computer Science, (which, to date, is still the most challenging course I have taken as a student).

I started in the MCS major hoping to work purely in computer science but my exposure to the intersection between mathematical modelling and the social sciences during my second year internship bred my interest in data science, where interdisciplinary work is essential. This led to my starting of Yale-NUS Data Science (now, Yale-NUS Tech) with my suitemates, Brian and Andrew. We wanted to bring data science to the masses at Yale-NUS since we saw data as playing a critical role in both traditionally STEM (like biology) and non-STEM fields (like history and political science).

The rest of my time at Yale-NUS cemented my desire (and provided the necessary conditions) to work in the field, first at NASA in their robotics and machine learning group and then at Locus Analytics, where I have been a data scientist ever since. My hope is to help communities design better economic systems through statistical network analysis and my work at Locus has trained me well for this. Most recently, I have moved from New York to New Haven to start school at Yale, where I will continue my training in statistics.

Hi I am Risa from the Class of 2019! I was born in Japan but was raised in the US, and while I was searching for a way to bring myself back to Asia for my college years, I was offered a place at Yale-NUS and could not have been more excited to become a part of this community.

In the first two years, I was a lost student in terms of major selection. But the Common Curriculum made me appreciate how much I enjoyed the MCS oriented courses, and I was always interested in pursuing some above-high-school-level mathematics, so it became very clear that MCS was the major to pursue.

Within MCS, I was most focused on the computer science path but also with a considerable time spent in math courses. Within computer science, I grew especially fascinated with function programming, and having taken some AMAZING courses under Professor Olivier Danvy, it was a no brainer for me to work with him for my capstone, which ended up being about delivering error messages in a functional programming language.

Post-graduation, I am now working as a Quantitative Investment Analyst in an investment bank. Although the content of my current work does not extend directly from what I pursued in MCS major, there are countless moments when I link back to Yale-NUS mathematics and computer science courses during work–either when I am using an investment model or writing programmes to execute investment strategies. Altogether, I do not think I could have reached to my current state in career without my time as a MCS major at Yale-NUS.

I am Swarnima, and I am presently the Strategic Innovation Manager at the London Stock Exchange Group. I chose to major in MCS because I was enthralled by the discipline and analytical rigour required to do well in it. It took me some time to settle on my major. Ultimately, I enjoyed the practice of formal proofs and thinking from first principles best, and it struck me as the major where I could best benefit from Yale-NUS’ close access to professors and our collegial, flipped-classroom approaches to teaching and learning. I was fascinated by how mathematics’ abstract constructions illustrate the systems of myriad real-world problems, and was particularly arrested by the application of mathematics in random and democratic systems, eventually doing an independent study (and subsequently, my capstone) on gerrymandering.

After I graduated, I wanted to work on challenging, impactful problems in an analytically demanding environment. After interning at ConsenSys as a software engineer building cryptographic protocols for communities to fund mesh networks, I was keen to continue to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the systems governing the world’s financial infrastructure. I worked as a data scientist at Thomson Reuters/Refinitiv’s innovation labs, and now work in the strategy and innovation department the London Stock Exchange Group, building machine learning products and bringing sustainable finance to the fore.

I am Qistina from the class of 2017 and I like to say that I am one of the first two female MCS majors at Yale-NUS!

I did not know that I really wanted to be a MCS major (with a focus on mathematics) until I took Number Theory as an elective, a class by Professor Martin Weissman. It was a lot of fun because he showed us a lot about the structure of numbers and patterns in numbers that I had not really thought of before. In that class, I felt like I was discovering new things and I was being challenged to think more creatively or from a perspective I had not considered. I enjoyed that class so much, I went on to take other mathematics electives and then finally confirmed Mathematics as my track within MCS at the end of my second year.

In my semester abroad, I took a class on Coding Theory, a field of mathematics that looks at mathematical principles/ structures that are useful in creating codes that can encode and decode information. It absolutely blew my mind how certain algebraic structures I only saw in a theoretical/ descriptive way could be used in real life. After that class, I spoke to my advisor and decided to focus on the applications of abstract algebra in coding theory for my capstone.

The academic freedom that I had at Yale-NUS allowed me to explore different subjects and decide for myself what I wanted to pursue. For example, even though I was an MCS major, I was able to do a 2MC independent study on dance in society with then Assistant Dean Suyin Chew. Yale-NUS did not require me to be particularly good at a subject for me to take it-the desire to learn was enough. That sense of ownership that I had over my education was something I wanted to bring to other students to help them feel more in control of their learning and to let them co-construct meaning in the classroom alongside their teachers. The stars aligned for me too because after graduation, one of my Yale-NUS classmates, who started an education start-up called The Global Citizen, offered me the position of Program Manager. It was such a meaningful role because I got to work with schools to plan extra-curricular programmes that supported students-led learning while achieving the school’s intended learning outcomes. Even though my role as an educator did not use my mathematic content knowledge as much, the creative problem-solving and critical thinking skills from both the training in my major and in the core curriculum helped me determine effective approaches for student engagement and learning based on what worked for my classmates and me as undergraduates.

Hello, I am Yao-Hui from the inaugural class of 2017! I am from Singapore and I am currently based in Seattle. At Yale-NUS, we were encouraged to dive deeply into more than just a single field of study. As an undergraduate, I gravitated towards both Economics and MCS. Despite completing all of the course requirements for the former, I decided late in my third year that I wanted to major in the latter instead. With the support of Yale-NUS faculty and staff, I was able to navigate this transition.

Within MCS, I specialised in Computer Science because I saw tremendous potential in using software to solve real-world problems. For my capstone , I built a web application for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. This was a prototype that provided translation services, peer-to-peer messaging, and quick access to local helplines. While I did not eventually scale up my project, I learnt much about the critical work done by migrant worker organisations and familiarised myself with the ins and outs of modern browser technologies.

Upon graduation, I began working full-time as a software engineer. I started my career at Carousell, where I developed features for users to buy and sell their preloved items online. I have since moved to Amazon, where I am helping medical providers deliver healthcare to their patients’ homes. This field continues to be rewarding for me because there are meaningful technical challenges to tackle, and overcoming them often translates into tangible benefits for individuals, families and communities.