For my undergraduate thesis, I employed a combination of empirical and qualitative tools of analysis to investigate whether Obama’s POWER Initiative+ reduced the unemployment rate of America’s coal communities as the U.S. transitioned to a more sustainable economy. My results indicated that POWER funding was effective in reducing the unemployment rate with skills-training policy interventions, supported by reputable, experienced institutions like the Appalachian Regional Commission. This research exemplifies how the PPE degree encourages interdisciplinary studies, as my research linked my interest in sustainable transformation strategies to economic policy.

I am currently working at Renergii Asia, a venture studio based in Singapore, to pair entrepreneurial talent with the most cutting-edge sustainability solutions, thereby, building more circular cities in Asia. I am also a Yenching Scholar at the Yenching Academy of Peking University where I am working towards an interdisciplinary Master of China Studies programme. I will be pursuing a thesis on policy interventions to encourage the adaption of sustainable finance in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The interdisciplinary approach of the PPE enabled me to explore diverse interests and zone in on the niche yet emerging field of climate finance, professionally and academically. In particular, I am grateful for the ability to analyse problems through a broad lens to understand complex issues posed by climate change.

I am originally from Austria, where I lived until I turned 18. At Yale-NUS, I majored in Philosophy, Politics and Economics . This major was my first choice because I wanted to extend the interdisciplinary aspect of the College’s flagship Common Curriculum. During my studies, I specialised in constitutional law and European politics. Currently, I am pursuing a Master’s degree in management at INSEAD. Afterwards, I will be joining Jardine Matheson as an Executive Trainee in Hong Kong. This position will allow me to accelerate my goal to become a senior executive at a leading multinational conglomerate in Asia.

I focused on Economics during my time in the PPE major but had the opportunity to take a number of amazing philosophy and politics courses, such as Vasubandhu by Associate Professor Amber Carpenter and Welfare State by Assistant Professor Ben Schupmann. The philosophy and politics components of PPE really informed my interests outside of college— I began writing for publications back home on social issues and interned for a number of think tanks. Ultimately, the combination of my interests in social impact and economics led me to pursue a Master’s in Public Health at Yale under the five-year concurrent programme with Yale-NUS. Currently in the last year of my public health programme, I have been able to learn about cool things like modelling COVID-19 transmission and the legal complexities of end-of-life care. My heart still lies in writing, something I developed during my time as a PPE major, and hope to pursue public health journalism after graduating from my master’s degree.

I am Rachel, born in Singapore but raised in Shanghai, China. I was a PPE major at Yale-NUS College, although not entirely by choice! I had the privilege of exploring my academic interests at the College, and realised somewhere in my second year that I was interested not only in Economics, but I was also interested in the Social Sciences space and studying inequality. Being a PPE major was hence a natural progression for me.

For my capstone project, I wrote about the employers of ex-offenders in Singapore and how more could be done in the public policy domain to better help ex-offenders reintegrate into society. I felt that it was important to shed light on this understudied space, and to integrate my knowledge of public policy with what I learnt about the philosophy of differentiated access at Yale-NUS.

Since graduation, I have completed my Master’s in Public Policy with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and have joined Oliver Wyman as a Research Analyst. My experiences with research at the College has led me down the path of pursuing an understanding of how different ideas affect us all across the globe. Outside of work, I volunteer my time to other qualitative research projects in Singapore, such as the Merpati Resettlement Project in the hopes that we can all understand the broader housing experiences of Singaporeans.

Hello! I am Betty Paul, a PPE major from the Class of 2020. I originally came to college set on majoring in Economics, but was so humbled and awestruck from the incredible professors we have in the philosophy / PPE department, so I chose to switch majors so I can continue to take as many of their courses as possible, and ended up having Philosophy as my primary under PPE! I was also the co-founder and former co-president of the Yale-NUS Womxn in Business student organisation. Upon graduation, I entered as an investment banking analyst at Credit Suisse in their office in Singapore. Within my one-year full-time work experience, I have covered corporate clients ranging various sectors, including consumer, fintech, and renewable energy, before settling in my final sector team covering energy and infrastructure corporate clients across APAC. I chose investment banking as my first job after graduation because of the wide sector exposure, to pick up analytical technical skills, and the chance to work on landmark deals across the region.

My name is Lionel and I am a Politics, Philosophy and Economics graduate from Yale-NUS. I came to Yale-NUS with the desire to broaden my perspectives, learn from a variety of disciplines, and break away from the structured mode of Singaporean education that I was accustomed to. At Yale-NUS, the Common Curriculum as well as the PPE major more than fulfilled these desires, and I continue to apply the critical thinking and analytical skills that I have picked up from Yale-NUS’ broad-based education to solve complex business problems across a wide array of industries in my current role as a management consultant.

Hi, I am Pragya from the Class of 2019. My Yale-NUS experience was characterised by four years of expansive growth across all dimensions of life, with a healthy dose of dance with the Bhangra community, copious amounts of chai making, and unexpected encounters with strangers that have morphed into lifelong, life-giving friendships.

The PPE major allowed me the flexibility to take classes that I enjoyed, without forcing me to pick an area of specialisation when I was not intellectually or academically ready. I was granted a nurturing space to self-determine my academic journey by weaving my evolving (and often times, disconnected) interests across subject areas. I took the approach of choosing semesterly classes that built on my emerging curiosities from previous semester(s), fully leveraging on the major’s promise of inter-disciplinary learning. Towards the end of junior year, Assistant Professor Robin Zheng’s class on Oppression and Injustice ignited my interest in social philosophy, and played a key role in guiding my capstone research.

I wrote my capstone on gendered on the job experiences of female Indian Administrative Services officers by leveraging on my ethnographic research training. I investigated the influence of cultural norms in shaping the working experiences of some of the most powerful women in the nation, and critically examined the relationship between gender and perceived vs actual power within bureaucracies. Deeply influenced by my positive experience as an Residential College Advisor in senior year, I was clear that my academic and professional pathways were distinct, with a few overlaps.

Upon graduation, I chose to work as a mentor to high school students, advising them on university education pathways, and personal roadmaps for key skills development. I currently lead the Sales and Marketing team at IvyPrep, an educational consulting company in Singapore.

Hi! I am Ajinkya from the Class of 2018. I attended Yale-NUS because I was attracted to the four-year residential learning experience and low faculty-student ratio with the Common Curriculum at its core. As a Singaporean, an overseas liberal arts education would have been out of reach for me, and words cannot describe how thankful I am to have received an education here. While I mostly specialised in economics, I took a whole gamut of classes across statistics, politics and anthropology. The interdisciplinary frameworks I developed in my “extracurricular” courses have all since come in useful in one way or another, sometimes more so than my core major. After graduation, I worked at an investment bank, before joining a development finance institution (IFC, an arm of the World Bank Group). I pursued this path because of the indelible mark that the College left on me—every student that passes through its doors develops this infectious belief that they can make an impact and build a green, equitable, and resilient future for the world.

I chose to major in Philosophy, Politics and Economics because I considered it the timeless study of civilisation, that would enable me to make sense of the world regardless of how science and technology changed. My focus centered on political philosophy, and I wrote my thesis about the evolution of the Chinese renminbi to an international currency with Professor John Driffill. Since graduation, I have helped build software products at start-ups—most recently I lead a product team at crypto.com, creating a digital wallet to drive cryptocurrency adoption globally. My plan is to continue making interesting technology useful and usable for people. I am most grateful to the Yale-NUS PPE major for nurturing my curiosity and ensuring that my bookshelves have continued expanding as rapidly as they did during my undergraduate years.

I entered the PPE major with a general interest in ethics and social thought, and was particularly captivated by studies of war criminals in the 1946 Nuremberg Trials. My classes in the major were broad in their scope, but allowed me to gain familiarity with specific texts and topics relevant to these interests. When I declared PPE as my major, I took introductory classes in ancient and modern political thought. This provided me groundwork for my senior year, during which I took advanced classes in contemporary ethics and the problem of evil. Through my coursework in the major, I gained a firm foundation in the history of ethical and political thought, which equipped me with the vocabulary to engage with topics in post-war ethics. The flexibility of the PPE major also allowed me to discuss ideas with faculty from multiple disciplines, spanning political science to philosophy and history. I completed my thesis on the 20th Century philosopher Hannah Arendt and her reflections on evil in the post-Enlightenment world.

After graduation, I went on to do an MA at the University of Chicago, focusing on Enlightenment ethics and postmodern political thought. My work in the MA was an expansion of my training in the PPE major, and I conducted advanced study in many topics and texts that I encountered during my undergraduate coursework. I am currently pursuing the PhD in Government at Georgetown University, with a focus in political philosophy. I work on just war theory in the history of ideas, with a particular focus on ethics and crisis government in classical antiquity, spanning the Peloponnesian War to the fall of the Roman Republic. After obtaining the PhD, I hope to return to Singapore and contribute to the educational field at the tertiary level.

My name is Joan, and I was part of the inaugural Class of 2017. My interest in Philosophy, Politics and Economics began with Rousseau during one of my Philosophy and Political Thought seminars. I then pursued independent studies on the authenticity of self, and on mental health through the lens of Nietzsche and Kant. I also worked in the Yale-NUS Cognition and Attention Lab, and the Yale Visual Cognitive & Neuroscience Lab. In these labs, I studied how we irresistibly find patterns in movement and dance and published this work in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review at the end of my third year.

My capstone, which was on the distinction between the static and the dynamic received the Outstanding Capstone Prize in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. As a competitive ballroom dancer, this distinction was salient to me in the contrast between dance and the other art forms. And it was also salient in one of the biggest philosophical divides of being versus becoming. I wanted to show how such a distinction could also have deep implications for how we think about the human mind.

I am currently pursuing a PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Yale University. I continue to study dynamic representations (i.e. events) in the mind and varieties of ‘imagination’ in psychology.

Hi, I am Stacey. I graduated in 2017 majoring in PPE and minoring in Arts and Humanities. I am currently pursuing a graduate degree in religion and ethics. I chose PPE because I appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of the major, which allowed me to integrate an understanding of philosophy and political theory with econometric and ethnographic research. I also appreciated the flexibility to choose from a variety of courses that fit with my interests, and also equipped me with valuable research and critical thinking skills.

I was particularly interested in ethics and human rights, and wanted to work on a project that could be used to improve the living and working conditions of neglected populations in Singapore. For my capstone, I conducted a study on the workplace entitlements knowledge of migrant domestic workers that combined policy and regression analyses. Part of the study involved creating a survey instrument that differentiates between levels of knowledge, and then going out to interview about 100 workers. It aimed to identify demographic and other factors that account for differing levels of knowledge to find ways to increase workers’ knowledge about their workplace entitlements. I particularly appreciated the privilege of speaking with so many workers and coming to understand my own position in the country I call home in a clearer, more poignant way.

After graduation, I worked for a bit in journalism and then investigative due diligence research, where I was also exposed to environmental, social, and governance issues in investment. I was interested in these roles because they allowed me to use my research, writing, and critical thinking skills while bringing in some social/ ethics angle into my work. But having side projects outside of paid work has been especially important for helping me stay involved in things I care about! That means working with low-income rental flat residents, dabbling for a while in parliamentary research, and, really, just making cardboard costumes for fun.