It was heart-warming for me to see Raeden and Aaron voice out such ardent school spirit. I too am tired of having to explain again and again that Yale-NUS isn’t an NUS faculty, and I too want to see Yale-NUS stand in equal with other universities in Singapore.
I, however, did not have the privilege of “rejecting prestigious universities around the globe” to come here; I was also lucky enough to have my parents be only 3000 kilometres away. I also feel that, somewhere amongst the 30,000 students at NUS, there are too those who took risks, who chose to be a part of NUS because they, like Raeden, wanted to be different.
I guess my qualm lies in the pronoun “we”—it assumes the identity and voice of a collective that may or may not have shared an individual’s experience and sentiments. I personally did not feel comfortable identifying with that “we”—a “we” that trivialised the experience of my friends at NUS. And so, I sincerely hope that, if and when PANOPT feels the need to speak on behalf of another, its writers and editors will do so with extreme humility, because everyone has his/her own stories, and these stories should be told with respect. —Hoa Nguyen ’17