Yale-NUS College Graduation 2024

Mdm Kay Kuok, Chair of the Yale-NUS Governing Board

Members of the Yale-NUS Governing Board

Professor Aaron Thean, Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost of NUS

Graduands, Parents, Families, Yale-NUS community and Friends

It is a pleasure to see all of you gathered here today, and to offer my congratulations to the Class of 2024!

Four years ago, you committed to join us on this life changing liberal arts journey. Before that, some of you may have faced common questions — such as, what are the liberal arts? Will you learn any relevant skills? Why do you want to take this path so less frequently chosen?

And yet still you embarked on this journey with us.

I am sure at some points during your time here, you may have returned to these questions. Perhaps as you struggled through some of the texts in the Modern Social Thought, or attempted to learn to program in R.

But let me assure you, that nothing learnt is irrelevant, nothing learnt is ever wasted.

Even things we learn and never return to. Like me, having learnt how to milk a cow with my father, or how to pickle vegetables with my mother. Things learnt, but never returned to. And yet, it is learning that is not wasted, learning that shapes who we are and who we become.

More recently, I’ve watched my children learn a seemingly irrelevant skill – how to speed solve a Rubik’s cube. I’ve seen them turn the cube over in their hands, trying to recognise just the right permutation, identify the best algorithm – sitting with the problem.  Patiently, and with perseverance.

I’ve seen the same in many of you during your time here. How you arrived on campus excited and ready to change the world! How you came here with your own ideas and opinions, and then started to hear from others and see perspectives different from your own. You sat with those differences, listened with patience and respect. And you began to see things from another’s point of view, to empathise, and to learn from each other’s diverse experiences and talents.

This took perseverance and yes, some patience. Broadening your world view, being able to see through another lens.  That is something that doesn’t come quickly or easily. Being forced in our Common Curriculum to tackle texts that often felt impenetrable and, in some cases, downright uninteresting. But you pressed on, and what was foreign became familiar, and for some, even became something you love.

Some including W.H. Auden have seen reading poetry and literature as an ongoing rehearsal for real life.  Or put more simply, Nora Ephron has said “an education is a rehearsal for life”. I would say that this too is what you have experienced at Yale-NUS, that a liberal arts education is very much a rehearsal for life after College.

Since coming to campus, you learnt to write a research paper, learnt to live with others very different from yourselves, and learnt how to resolve conflict in a respectful manner. Some of you built perseverance through your capstone projects, some learnt how to live and adapt to a foreign country, others learnt how to dance Bhangra, and how to sew a top stitch in our fabrication studios.

Let me assure you that despite what you might think now, none of those skills will go to waste. In fact, this varied range of experiences have perhaps taught you the most important thing across these four years – that with patience and perseverance and a strong community around you, you can take on anything.

If you leave us today with just one key takeaway, I hope that this is it.

Because you are inheriting a world full of problems. Many of which we have no idea how to face, let alone resolve. As John Maynard Keynes astutely said “(t)he inevitable never happens. It is the unexpected always.”

To face that unexpected future, we aren’t even sure what the relevant skills will be.

But I know that just by being open to learning, and to learning from those around you with a generous and open spirit, you will face these challenges with hope and positivity. That is the first step to change.

Learning in community is demanding. It challenges us and reminds me of a line often attributed to Walt Whitman encouraging us to “be curious, not judgemental”. That we are able to sit in discomfort, to be vulnerable and open, to share our resources and capabilities, to be generous with our space, our time, our views and to assume that we have much to learn from one another. That we ask for help when we need it and give it when we are able to render it.

I have seen this in you in many ways large and small.

Whether by delivering food to friends who were under Stay- Home Notice during the pandemic, by contributing ideas and efforts to improve our dining hall food and to make our campus safer and more accessible, or by welcoming new members, even those from beyond Yale-NUS, into our clubs, organisations and community.

I wonder then if these are not the skills that are needed for this century? The skills that come from a liberal arts education, the very skills that I have seen you model over your four years here with us. This has shaped you into the kind of learner, the kind of citizen that these problems and this world requires.

Seen like this, I think this has indeed been a vibrant, dynamic rehearsal.

We send you out today, knowing you are equipped with the skills to learn, to unlearn or change your views, and the ability to live your lives with grace, integrity, curiosity and generosity.

The powerful community you have built for yourselves here and that our alumni are building for you beyond Yale-NUS will be there to support you.

As you move into your next phase of life, know that you have within you the capacity to build other new communities.

Armed with these skills, and these communities, we will watch you change Asia and the world.

Congratulations Class of 2024!