Profiles of Class of 2019 graduates

Class of 2019, USA
Yenching Scholar at the Yenching Academy of Peking University

Helena Juliette Auerswald is the first Yale-NUS student to be selected as a Yenching Scholar, and will enrol in the interdisciplinary Master’s in China Studies programme at the Yenching Academy of Peking University. The programme is focused on the role of China within the humanities and social sciences at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in China. The Academy annually enrols approximately 125 students each year from partner universities, which recommend only their top contenders to the programme. Since the programme started in 2015, only two students from Singaporean institutions have been awarded the Yenching Scholarship. Scholars have taken various paths with about 30 percent progressing to PhD level studies at renowned institutions like Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Duke University. Others have taken up key positions in international companies like Google, The Associated Press and General Electric. She believes that China’s return to global leadership is going to present some of the greatest challenges and opportunities of her generation.

Helena first became interested in China while growing up in Washington DC and studying Mandarin for six years, giving her exposure to Chinese language and culture from a young age. Her interest in US-China relations stemmed from her Global Affairs courses, in which she studied how the US and China manage and exert their power overseas, especially in Southeast Asia. Helena will start classes at Yenching Academy in September 2019.

Helena is also the recipient of the Class of 2017 Award for outstanding contributions to the College, as selected by the senior class and the Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Global Affairs for 2019.

“Through the Common Curriculum at Yale-NUS, I learned about Chinese literature and philosophy, from which I began to develop a deeper understanding of the vast differences between different periods of Chinese history and geographical areas of China.”

Class of 2019, USA
Engineering Analyst at Goldman Sachs New York

Brian Bohme is an Engineering Analyst at the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York, USA, working in the Core Engineering and Digital Strategy division. Brian majored in Mathematical, Computational and Statistical Sciences and minored in Arts and Humanities while pursuing various courses in economics or business in-between. His work is aligned with his background and interests as he gets to innovate and build creative platforms for the rapidly evolving financial world. Brian’s main priority when building financial platforms is to create a beautiful and intuitive design, a priority mainly informed by his exposure to the arts in the Yale-NUS curriculum.

Brian played a key role in creating and leading the Yale-NUS Data Science Club, which deepened his understanding of solution and problem spaces which now lie at the forefront of his work. Brian also worked as a student associate at the Admissions & Financial Aid office throughout his stint in College, which was one of the most valuable experiences for him in developing social aptitude and interacting with a diversity of people. For Brian, these are essential skills that he uses within an expansive corporate environment. He intends to leverage on these skills to help develop and manage design systems that scaffold a new generation of performant financial platforms driven by intelligent and engaging experiences.

“One of the most surprising things to me when I joined Goldman Sachs was the expected set of skills and behaviours beyond just a technical acumen that one must possess to excel. Yale-NUS equipped with me with not only the technical skills I needed, but also an inquiry-driven and interconnected mindset that has helped me better communicate with different stakeholders and contextualise their needs. The financial world is quickly becoming more consumer-oriented with a strong emphasis on client and digital experience. Not only knowing how to build these platforms, but also how to critique and impart how and why they are developed in a certain way has been of utmost value and something I am only able to execute because of Yale-NUS’s unique culture and curriculum”

Class of 2019, Thailand
Pursuing a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Dartmouth College

Nawat Bunnag is pursuing a doctorate degree in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. As a first year PhD candidate, he is rotated to three different laboratories to do research work. Nawat is in the process of wrapping up his second laboratory rotation. He shared that it has been a very rewarding yet fun experience to move between laboratories and get involved in research in different areas of biology, which reminded him of his time at Yale-NUS.

According to Nawat, Yale-NUS provided a conducive and challenging environment for him to pursue research in the biological sciences, and his time at Yale-NUS has helped him discover his passion for research while experiencing first-hand the scientific community’s unwavering effort to unravel the complex questions ever-present in biology.

“Looking back at my time in Yale-NUS, I am extremely grateful for the opportunities to work closely with various professors in the life sciences major. I spent a lot of my time outside of class in laboratories working on research projects. The small and tight-knit nature of Yale-NUS demanded students work towards becoming independent investigators and proficient communicators of science while managing classes and other commitments. As there was always a direct channel for feedback and communication with professors, there were always chances for great learning experiences both inside and outside of the laboratory.”

Class of 2019, Austria and the United States
Associate Product Manager at Visa, Inc. (San Francisco)

Cora Ceipek is an Associate Product Manager at Visa in San Francisco. In this role, she is part of a rotational programme in which she works with different teams to gain experience working on a variety of products at the company. Prior to working at Visa, Cora interned at various companies and organisations. The summer before her sophomore year, she interned at She’s the First, a non-profit organisation that uses education to combat gender inequality. This stint, coupled with working as a Student Associate for the Yale-NUS College Admissions & Financial Aid office, piqued her interest in marketing. She also held marketing internships at several multinational companies including a legal research company and a software reseller. These internships helped her hone her creativity and analytical skills as she gained experience in data analysis, marketing strategy, and social media marketing.

“Chat with as many people as you can about the nature of the work you’re going into, and try different kinds of opportunities to see what you enjoy. Don’t hesitate to engage with an advisor from the Centre for International & Professional Experience (CIPE) or other mentor figure with any guidance you need along the way.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Research Officer at Community Psychology Hub

Joanna Chue is a Research Officer at Community Psychology Hub, where she does applied research in the community setting. Specifically, she works on projects in the disability sector. Part of her work involves policy, assessment and intervention research on children with developmental disabilities and support implementation of programmes within social service agencies.

At Yale-NUS, Joanna took psychology courses on conducting research in both the academic and community setting, such as the psychology laboratory course, which were very enriching experiences. Joanna is grateful to the Yale-NUS curriculum for exposing her to how research methods can uncover needs in the community and subsequently address these needs.

Joanna is also one of the joint recipients for the Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Psychology for 2019.

“I am deeply thankful for the chance to complete an attachment at an autism residential facility during my semester abroad. This short but meaningful exposure encouraged me to pursue a job working in the disability sector; as it showed me how nascent the services in Singapore were, and how much I wanted to be part of this growing field. Most of all, it was the constant support from friends and professors that encouraged me to explore my options and pursue my interest.” 

Class of 2019, Singapore
Business Analyst at Digital McKinsey

Dhivesh Dadlani is a business analyst at Digital McKinsey, part of McKinsey & Company. He is currently involved in digital business building in Hanoi, Vietnam. In his role, he works on a wide range of digital topics such as defining a digital strategy, building a digital business, proposing a technology architecture for a digital service, transforming organisation and governance in companies.

Dhivesh noted that a good understanding of stakeholders plays a critical role in consulting, which is a people-focused business. He is grateful to the College for providing an environment for students to learn and grow by engaging with a wide variety of opinions. In addition, the communications skills honed during his capstone experience taught him how to convey new information and key messages to different audiences.

“While the Economics major has provided me with quantitative skills that will be useful at McKinsey, it is the College’s diversity of opinions that has taught me how to approach complex issues. Yale-NUS has taught me how to listen and engage with an issue even when my peers are approaching it from different perspectives. I feel that this is important in consulting, where we need to understand many stakeholders’ opinions and leverage different perspectives of our team members to solve complex problems.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Pursuing a postgraduate diploma in education at the National Institute of Education

Hazirah Helmy is pursuing her postgraduate diploma in education at the National Institute of Education (NIE) before becoming a teacher. She thinks that her experience at Yale-NUS has enriched her as a student and as a future teacher.

Hazirah also served as a Residential College Advisor, a role in the residential community where appointed senior students provide care and guidance to a group of assigned first-year students. In this role, she has learnt to develop her mentorship and facilitation skills, which she hopes will help in building good relationships with her mentors, colleagues and students. She feels the experience has also trained her to be flexible in responding to different situations in her future role as a teacher.

“I think I’ve grown a lot over the past few years and my outlook on education and how lessons should be conducted has broadened considerably, so I hope I will have more to contribute. I also think Yale-NUS has given me some really valuable experiences and perspectives that I hope I can share with my students.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Recipient of the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s Media Education Scholarship

Koh Zhi Hao, a recipient of the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s Media Education Scholarship, will work and learn from a local filmmaker for two years after graduating.

While at college, Zhi Hao was a member of the Yale-NUS Filmmakers. He also had the opportunity to study for a semester at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and pursued an internship with local film company Zhao Wei Films. Such exposure, he said, allowed him to cultivate his artistic and academic interests in a concrete, real world setting that he would otherwise not have gotten locally, and he will carry with him this globally and historically informed perspective into his creative career.

“My Yale-NUS experience has been hugely influential towards my filmmaking. It is here where I discovered a love for the classics – the Greek & Roman history and literature that I have read under my minor, Global Antiquity, has had a profound impact on the kinds of stories that I wish to tell and the approach I take in the telling.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Toronto

Vincent Lee is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Toronto in Canada. Vincent’s first encounter with philosophy was before he started at Yale-NUS College, but he attributed his College experience for helping him develop his intellectual interests.

Vincent’s philosophical muses are Spinoza and the Indian Buddhists. To him, these philosophies are both research themes that are ascendant in the field, which makes them even more exciting to work on. Spinoza and the Indian Buddhists ask a rare question in philosophy: what does a concept do? Answering this question forms the main thrust of his upcoming research project.

Vincent shared that his training through the Yale-NUS Common Curriculum and the unique Global Antiquity minor has guided his academic interests in both the European and Indian worlds.

“It is difficult to find a curriculum as diverse, whilst being rigorous, as that of Yale-NUS’. It is truly the whole Yale-NUS package that developed in me a sense of appreciation for how philosophy ought to be done – not just in our heads or on paper, but through dialogue across wide swathes of space and time.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Software engineer at Facebook Singapore

Daniel Lok will be joining Facebook Singapore as a software engineer after graduating from Yale-NUS College, where he majored in Mathematical, Computational and Statistical Sciences. Daniel has been set on this career path since entering the College as he enjoys building things, and finds it very rewarding when people find the things he built to be useful.

Daniel said that his experience at Yale-NUS has enabled and encouraged him to think about and engage with important social issues. In fields such as software engineering, where products can have potentially massive social reach, these are lessons that Daniel finds to be immensely important to keep in mind.

“It goes without saying that Yale-NUS has equipped me with the technical skills I’ll need, but that is something that many universities can offer. The unique thing about Yale-NUS’s curriculum and culture is that it has fundamentally shaped the way I think about the world around me, and my relationship to it.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Deputy Manager (International Relations) at Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore

Neo Xiaoyun works in the International Relations division of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS). In her role, she helps to advance and maintain positive and constructive bilateral and multilateral relations for the greater goal of protecting Singapore’s strategic aviation interests, and promoting a safe and efficient international civil aviation system. As the officer handling the Federal Aviation Administration and International Organisations portfolios, her day-to-day work involves thinking and planning mid- and long-term strategies for enhancing and deepening the collaborations between CAAS and their organisations.

Xiaoyun majored in Environmental Studies and minored in History at Yale-NUS. While these majors might not appear directly applicable to her current job, she noted that the broad-based, globally-oriented liberal arts and science education offered by Yale-NUS has equipped her with skills in interdisciplinary thinking, critical analysis and writing. According to Xiaoyun, these skills are very helpful in her daily tasks, which involve reading past concept papers and MOUs to understand the various existing collaborations, and evaluating and tracking the progress of these projects, which can be quite steeped in the technical language of safety regulation, data analytics and air traffic management.

“Academics aside, my active involvement in a plethora of extra-curricular activities over four years in Yale-NUS, such as tchoukball, bhangra, road relay, floorball and the Yale-NUS Sustainability Movement (or I’dECO), has definitely honed soft skills which are also crucial in my job. Qualities such as intercultural understanding and communication, decision-making, problem-solving and time-management are all important and relevant to my current work.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Coordinator for International Relations (English) at Kyushu National Museum

Ng Hui Lin is a Coordinator for International Relations in the Cultural Exchange Division at Kyushu National Museum in Japan. Her work focuses on English-Japanese interpretation and translation. She also designs programmes for exchange students, and provides multilingual support for partner organisations. Hui Lin works with her colleague to ensure that information about the museum’s artefacts and exhibitions are both informative and engaging for English-speaking visitors.

While she majored in Physical Sciences (Chemistry) in Yale-NUS, she took a wide variety of elective classes from other disciplines, such as Life Sciences, Arts and Humanities (Art History), and History. She also took advantage of Yale-NUS’ partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS) Centre for Language Studies and studied Japanese for three years.

Hui Lin said that Yale-NUS’ flexible academic requirements are especially valuable because they allowed her the freedom to discover new interests while pursuing existing ones. In her current workplace, she handles a wide range of material related to art, history, language, culture, and even conservation science. She appreciates the knowledge and critical skills that she gained at Yale-NUS for helping her to learn and adapt on the job.

“As someone who constantly wonders about how things work – be it scientific systems or artistic techniques – and is also passionate about language and communication, my experience in Yale-NUS both reaffirmed and nurtured my desire to explore widely and with a childlike sense of curiosity.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Pursuing a Masters of Environmental Management at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Upon graduation, Rachel Ooi will be pursuing her Masters of Environmental Management at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. After which, she will work at the National Environment Agency, to fulfil the terms of her scholarship. She shared that Yale-NUS College has provided her with a lot of resources, academic expertise, and career guidance, which she drew heavily on as she prepared to enter the workforce. However, what she values the most is the freedom and flexibility that the Environmental Studies major here has given her.

Rachel specialised in environmental humanities, and her undergraduate degree culminated in a creative capstone project. She wrote and illustrated a picture book about the emotional and environmental costs of Singapore’s pursuit of progress.

“The picture book has nothing to do with my career goal of implementing beneficial environmental policies, but I am really glad to have had the space to simultaneously pursue such different passions and study how they can inform each other.”

Class of 2019, Bangladesh
Co-founder of VERE360

Adila Sayyed is a graduate of Yale-NUS’ Leadership Certificate Programme, a multi-year programme designed to support student leaders to drive social change. Her leadership journey started with her internship in an educational start-up in the Philippines during the summer of her first year and co-leading KidsAccomplish, an enrichment programme run by Yale-NUS students for students aged eight to 12. In 2017, she became a UN Sustainable Development Goal talent for Goal 4 (Quality Education). As a result of this involvement, Adila co-founded VERE360, an education start-up using immersive technology to educate people on social issues.

“Through my experiences in student organisations and summer opportunities, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in something innovative and impactful. I started considering launching a start-up that could value add to education with an immersive technology like virtual reality. Today the start-up is already one year old and has helped multiple educational organisations value-add their curricula with virtual reality in Singapore and Indonesia.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Pursuing a career in Osborne Clarke law firm

Cephas Tan is a graduate from the Double Degree Programme in Law and Liberal Arts. During his time with Yale-NUS, Cephas shared a suite with several classmates who majored in Mathematical, Computational and Statistical Sciences. This exposure to computer science has been a deeply enjoyable and intellectual journey, inspiring in Cephas a deep interest in the intersection of law and technology. With this interest, he has embarked on legal tech projects, such as Uppercase.sg, a website that provides a simple, user-friendly and efficient search engine for Parliamentary debates.

Cephas is pursuing a career in Osborne Clarke’s Singapore practice, where he will begin his training in the Telecommunications, Media and Technology department in January 2020 after his bar examinations.

“I was first attracted to this programme for its interdisciplinary curriculum — which I believed to be crucial for lawyers to navigate today’s extremely quick-paced world. Five years into this programme, I have been convinced.”

Class of 2019, Singapore
Management Associate at Ascendas-Singbridge

In February 2019, Ernest Tan received the inaugural Bartell Prize for his capstone research on sand mining, awarded at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies’ Human Development Conference (HDC). Ernest developed an interest in the issue of sand mining while he was on semester abroad in Kenya, where he realised that sand mining is a complex urbanisation and poverty-related issue that has been relatively under-researched.

Ernest’s research is a product of the strong theoretical foundation he has picked up through the Urban Studies curriculum, as well as through the broad-based liberal-arts education he has received at Yale-NUS. Outside the classroom, Ernest is also grateful for the support he has received through the Centre for International and Professional Experience (CIPE), where career advisors have helped him and his classmates obtain experiences in urban policy research, planning consultancy, and cross-cultural fieldwork. These experiences have equipped him well to reflect critically on the challenges of urbanisation through a range of skillsets and perspectives.

Building on these diverse experiences, Ernest continues to pursue his interest in urban development by joining the Management Associate Programme at Ascendas-Singbridge. The programme will grant him exposure to the company’s various functions, from property management to business development and investments. This will give him a broad-based perspective of the real-estate industry, equipping him to contribute to the company’s vision of creating sustainable townships, industrial parks and commercial space solutions. Through this work, Ernest hopes to actualise his interests in creating sustainable urban development that benefits local communities.

Ernest is also one of the joint recipients for the Prize for Outstanding Capstone Project in Urban Studies for 2019.

“The Urban Studies programme has trained me to be able to understand a place using a variety of methods. Being able to piece different types of information together was very helpful when doing fieldwork. I am excited to begin work and intend to pursue a career creating truly sustainable urban development that benefits local communities.”