Student organisations create nurturing spaces for new interests

To cater to the numerous interests within our diverse student population, Yale-NUS students actively seek opportunities to create new student organisations that offer learning spaces for personal growth, and encourage the exploration of new passions.

GAMBIT: Yale-NUS Chess Club was established to build a community of chess players and share their love for the sport with others. Jacqueline Jin (Class of 2023), founder and president of GAMBIT, said, “Our goal is simple – to help players grow their chess game in a collaborative, educational, and fun manner.” In order to make the sport accessible to all, weekly meetings with the chess coach are open not just to the club members, but anyone who is interested. “We want to encourage peers at any skill level to gain exposure to chess and experience what it has to offer,” Jacqueline elaborated.

As a former competitive chess player, Jacqueline wanted to make it easier for people to pick up the sport. “In particular, I’ve seen how female players are less prevalent than male players, and I want to encourage women to play to bring more diversity to the chess scene,” she said.

In fact, the name of the organisation itself reflects this motivation. “I named the club GAMBIT as a reference to “Queen’s Gambit”, both a chess opening and a TV show starring a female character who successfully navigated through this male-dominated sport,” Jacqueline explained.

Image of a weekly meeting hosted by GAMBIT, which usually features one-on-one chess matches. Image provided by Jacqueline Jin.

Since its founding, GAMBIT has participated in and hosted various events. Its members played tournaments in the Inter-College and Inter-Faculty games earlier this year, and won the first and second place prizes, respectively, against teams across the National University of Singapore.

GAMBIT hopes to continue hosting events and invite more people – within Yale-NUS and beyond – into the world of chess. “If there is enough interest, we’d also love to take some members to chess competitions around Singapore to experience competitive chess,” Jacqueline said.

Another group that is providing space for a new area of interest to grow is the Yale-NUS Farming Collective. The group wanted to use green spaces around the campus more productively, and encourage reflection and conversations surrounding sustainability in Singapore.

“We aim to make campus farming spaces more open and accessible to everyone in our community, and learn from the local farming scene,” explained Marilyn Kang (Class of 2022), president of the Farming Collective. “We hope that our organisation will anchor the school in learning and engaging in urban farming, food security and sustainability in our time and region.”

Last semester, the Collective hosted weekly farming sessions at Saga College’s rooftop farm and Cendana College Farm, which were open for all members of the group.

A farming session at Saga College’s rooftop farm. Image provided by Marilyn Kang.

To make the idea and practice of sustainability more accessible, and integrate campus urban farms into the residential life at Yale-NUS, the Farming Collective regularly held events to engage the College community. These included collections for fruit peels or coffee grounds from other student-led initiatives, such as Brewhouse which provides coffee to the Yale-NUS community, that were used for the group’s farming activities. For Marilyn, her favourite event was the ‘Harvest & Cookout’ that took place earlier this year.

“We harvested a wide variety of edibles from the Saga Farm, including lots of herbs and vegetables, and prepared a full meal, comprising dishes like toast with pesto (the freshest in town!) and fried rice with ulam raja (a medicinal herb), tomato, and ginger flowers,” she said. “Besides the fun and food, the occasion marked the culmination of a semester’s worth of effort and embodied the spirit of community-building, communal sharing and consciousness about food systems that our organisation aspires towards.”

They also collaborated with external partners, Green Circle Eco-Farm, and Bollywood Veggies, to conduct farm tours and connect with Singapore’s local farming community. In their latest project in July, they partnered fellow student organisation, Roosevelt Network at Yale-NUS College, to hold a three-day panel for the wider College community, titled “From Farm to Fork to Table”, which featured external partners, alumni and students discussing the future of food sovereignty in Singapore.

Similarly, The Architecture Collective (TACO) hopes to bring the world of architecture closer to students with varying degrees of interest in the area. TACO was founded last semester by Joy Heng and Raphael Chang (both from Class of 2022), who were inspired by an Urban Studies module they took on urban spaces.

“Yale-NUS provided us with many opportunities to develop our ideation and design skills, but we wanted to bring this a step further by creating a learning space that brings students fascinated by architecture together,” explained Raphael.

The first installation of the TACO Talks series in November 2020, with Darren Soh (front, left). Image provided by Raphael Chang.

TACO has hosted activities that catered to individuals with varying knowledge in architecture. For students who wanted to improve technical skills, TACO organised workshops for programmes such as Google SketchUp (a 3D modelling computer programme often used in architectural design). The group also launched its first installation of the TACO Talks series, where local architecture photographer Darren Soh was invited to share about the heritage and conservation of Singaporean architecture.

Despite being a fairly young student organisation, TACO is already making impressive progress. Students from the group recently clinched several awards in competitions organised by prestigious non-profit organisation Non-Architecture, such as winning the Remote Work Cabin Competition, and receiving Honourable Mentions in other competitions on envisioning a post-pandemic city and redesigning a cycling bridge. TACO intends to send more teams to participate in competitions.

To expose the student community to architecture and develop their interest in the subject, TACO also plans to explore new types of events. “Some key activities we intend to organise include ‘Dinner with Designers’, where we connect with local architects and designers over dinner at their homes,” Raphael shared. “We also believe film is an excellent way to make architecture accessible, and have a collection of brilliant films that we hope to screen to the College community.”

For these new student organisations, the past academic year is only the beginning of their journey, and they are excited to develop novel ways for the community to explore interests and learn.