My name is Lana, and I was born in Vietnam, raised in Florida, USA, and then moved to Singapore in 2017 to study at Yale-NUS College where I majored in Urban Studies. Within the first few months of college, I had the privilege of visiting Sarawak, Malaysia as part of RCX as well as participating in the Week 7 Learning Across Boundaries (LAB) in Mussoorie and Rishikesh, India. These trips were soon followed by summers in New York City and Paris, then a semester abroad in London— not to mention the traveling in between while abroad or during recess weeks.

I ultimately decided to pursue Urban Studies after a class trip during my second year to Batam, Indonesia where we examined a multiplicity of housing provisions across the region. I realised that using the city as a medium to understand various social or urban phenomena that underpinned our everyday experiences was something that I was passionate about— especially since I was in a different city every four months. Given that urban studies allows you to explore the city from a variety of perspectives, I was able to examine social, environmental, physical planning, economic, anthropological, and political processes all through the lens of the city while simultaneously connecting and applying these analyses to my real-life experiences across countries.

In the end, I settled on the social development of kopitiams and cafe culture within Singapore as my capstone subject in which I combined history, sociology, and field work to analyse the coffee landscape. Through analysing this niche sub culture within Singapore, it constituted be ‘urban’ simply by being a process and culture occurred within and formed a fundamental part of the city-state’s rich history and culture.

Urban Studies has been the ideal major in which it is interdisciplinary enough to both provide me with a means of understanding the world from a holistic perspective as well as provide a platform to combine my personal and academic interests.

Urban studies allows me to delve deeper into my current interests and my curiosity is always piqued. It is fun. Getting to know the faculty more has been one of my most memorable experience in the major to date. They all have a cool story and are always open to share about their lives. Navigating my interests with them has been exciting.

I do not think you can view cities (or elements of the city) the same way once you have taken an Urban Studies class. It has become a lens in which I use to question and engage with the world. I love that there is always something to ask and learn. I have even learned about humanist design in hospitals and the importance of dirt!

I believe there is no better reason than to learn something that is so relevant in this urban age and environment that we live in. By virtue that I can walk right out of the classroom, see, study and apply what I have learnt on books to the everyday urban life around me never ceases to amaze me. My most memorable experience has to be my Urban Singapore class with Professor Chua Beng Huat. For that class, we studied thinkers such as Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman and learnt the importance of studying the everyday life. How is it that we can walk through some of the most crowded thoroughfares in the city, barely collide into anybody else and see fights erupt? Why is there a strong need to assert individuality over the masses when one lives in the city? These very actions that we come to take for granted so much has actually so much embedded knowledge that goes unnoticed because of its banality. This class really gave me a new perspective of appreciating and studying the everyday around me.

Born and raised in China but trained in Singapore since 2011, I am a cheerful person who values independent thinking and aspires to maintain a lifelong curiosity to understand human potentials. The decision to major in Urban Studies was serendipitous, because I was (still) lost about what to study by the end of my second year. On retrospect, I discovered my interests through taking urban studies courses and unknowingly benefited from faculty who not only inspire students in classroom, but dedicate themselves to educating respectful, inquisitive, and kind individuals beyond the classroom. As a huge fan of ground-up research and a firm believer in the power of everyday activities, I focused my capstone on studying the informal social networks of older adults in Singapore and re-confirmed elderly people are capable of self-organising social networks through everyday activities, while contributing to the maintenance of social order. After graduation, I started in a business role in a global asset management firm and am now specialising in building access between portfolio managers and public companies.

I have always been interested in sociology, and I believe the best way to learn it is through majoring in Urban Studies at Yale-NUS. Growing up in a fast-developing city Wuhan, I was amazed by how people’s perceptions of their everyday lives are shaped by urban environments. I hope to better understand the socio-political dynamics of a particular physical space.

A memorable experience taking this major has to be when Professor Chua Beng Huat took us to eat at the back alley of a Tze Char restaurant to experience the true Singapore urban living.

I like the spontaneity of the city. The endless possibilities of political expression, cultural inventions and the amorphous yet solidly present sense of community embodied by the city.

Hi! I am Gertie from the Class of 2019, and I majored in Urban Studies at Yale-NUS.

I have always been interested in the built environment and its relation to the society; hence Urban Studies was a really obvious choice for me. Once I entered the programme though, I realised that urban studies was much more all-encompassing than I previously thought. Urban studies opened my eyes to the intricacies behind and impacts of architectural forms and ideologies; but also made me more aware of less tangible/obvious factors that shape our society like urban policies, infrastructure, and memories.

My capstone research focused on urban design and play in the city as a way to re-envision existing cities to be more inclusive and dynamic, specifically looking at case studies of street closures and urban street parties. Through my capstone, I explored the tension between the more directionless, “functionless” and “wasteful” play and the urban, which tends to prioritise productivity. I found out that Singapore seemed to have reconciled that tension by appropriating and taming “play” — making sure it is regulated and generates certain economic output.

Presently, I am doing business development in Sembcorp Development, an urban and real estate developer under Sembcorp Industries. The company had sponsored my education at Yale-NUS, and I am working here as part of my scholarship bond. As part of the business development team, I help to look at new opportunities for integrated industrial parks and township developments, high-tech business parks, as well as supporting residential projects in China and Vietnam. I am also helping to look at sustainability solutions and efforts to incorporate into our new projects to align the company with the global sustainability action.

Hello, I am Holly! I am from the US, specifically Boise, Idaho. When I entered Yale-NUS I had no firm plan for what I would major in, though I knew I was interested in politics. Geography is not a commonly taught discipline in the US, so I did not consider Urban Studies at first— I do not particularly love architecture, maps, or big cities! I ultimately chose to major in Urban Studies for its insistence on the importance of lived experience. I found that asking questions about space and place ensured that larger questions of inequality or justice were grounded in how people actually live and move through their environments on a day-to-day basis.

For my capstone, I was curious as to how the immense project of land reclamation (the expansion of Singapore’s land mass by building on imported sand) had become so naturalised in Singapore history. I explored how this discourse had been constructed over many years through key arguments about the nation-state, the public, and the sea.

After graduation I joined the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, a research centre at Singapore University of Technology and Design. I was intrigued by their research on the ways in which digital technologies are, or may be, affecting Singapore society. This led me to study the experiences of individuals who have dealt with online harassment and abuse and to become passionate about pushing for better victim support. Inspired by this research, my colleague and I co-founded and continue to run an independent website called solidground.sg to provide practical information for anyone facing online harms in Singapore.

I am Elson, a Singaporean who is currently based in Hong Kong. I graduated from Yale-NUS College in 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons), majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in Global Affairs.

I chose Urban Studies as my major because of my interest in understanding about global migration into cities, as well as how spatial design impacts innovation. The suite of course offerings under the Urban Studies major such as Creative Cities, Cityscapes and Urban Forms, and Urban Spatial Reasoning and Visualisation helped me pursue my academic interest, which eventually prompted me towards the study of co-working spaces. My capstone examined the reasons for the rise of co-working spaces in Singapore, and explored the networks and collaborations that occurred in these spaces. After graduation, I joined Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong as a Treasury Product Control Analyst under the Finance Division. I chose the Finance and Banking industry as the industry is fast-paced and dynamic, and plays an important role in the economy. I am currently an Associate in the Corporate Treasury Division in Goldman Sachs. My work involves understanding the underlying liquidity needs and funding profiles for different businesses across the firm.

My name is Hoa and I am an Urban Studies major from the class of 2017. In the true spirit of liberal arts, I pretty much tried everything that Yale-NUS had to offer— from Art History to Python to Chinese Literature— and through that process of unintentional elimination, I ended up with urban studies. When I chose Urban Studies as a major, I had not taken a single class in the major, but I thought, “Well, if nothing else seems to fit, then this must be it.”

Having “ended up” with a major in Urban Studies was pretty much one of the best decisions I made during university. I thoroughly enjoyed every single class and had so many “a-ha” moments; my world views were being shaped and reshaped pretty much every other week. I found that theories behind the making of public space fascinated me greatly, and the unintentional making of public space intrigued me even more, when spaces that are not planned become the places that are most loved. As my capstone, I studied the Esplanade Underpass, a space actively used and loved by many informal arts groups, although it was never planned as such. My favourite part was talking to a couple of middle-age ballroom dancers about how comfortable they feel rehearsing their routines there, amidst all the skateboarders and university dancers.

I am now in my third job since graduating from Yale-NUS College. I was first a Researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, then a Strategy Consultant at Eden Strategy Institute, and now a Senior Associate in Policy and Planning at enCity Urban Solutions. Three jobs in four years may not appeal to some employers, but I guess self-exploration and actualisation continue beyond the four years of university, and it is all right to take some time to figure things out.