2022
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Why did you choose to do a PhD?
Biology was a subject that I really enjoyed learning ever since secondary school. I found it fascinating how the cells in our body function and how slight perturbations could result in debilitating diseases. Additionally, during my polytechnic and undergraduate studies, I embarked on several research projects and internships in various fields e.g cancer, neuroscience, stem cells that sparked my interest in pursuing a scientific career.
I believed that a PhD degree would train me to be an independent researcher and allow me to eventually have the autonomy to dictate my own research direction. Furthermore, it would challenge me intellectually, allow me to learn extensively about a topic of interest and also, provide me the opportunity for me to grow both personally and professionally.
Why did you choose to do graduate education at NUS? If you received offers from other universities, why did you pick NUS?
I was keen on working on projects that were related to precision medicine and the PhD projects offered by NUS ere more clinically relevant. Additionally, besides the good research facilities available, NUS has a strong network of clinicians to collaborate with and access to patient derived samples.
How does graduate school compare to your undergraduate experience?
As an undergraduate student, most of the answers that we seek are easily found in the textbook or lecture notes. However, as a graduate student, no one knows the answer to your research question that you are trying to solve. Additionally, there’s a lot more expectations of a graduate student. For example, as a graduate student, you are competing internationally against researchers with decades of experience. Thus, a graduate student is expected to be able to digest a large amount of information quickly, conceptualize and come up with a research direction. It is also important as a graduate student to be up to date with the relevant field of study, be innovative, resourceful and independent. Importantly, as a graduate student, you have to be resilient as you would encounter many failures along the way.
Share a challenge you faced in graduate school and how you overcame it.
I lacked clarity and proper planning of my research project at the beginning of my PhD and as a result I hit a dead end and had to discard 80% of my data that I’ve generated from the first 2 years. Because of this experience, I lost motivation for a few months and I did not want to try new experiments anymore as I was afraid of failing again,
Thankfully, I had a good support system and I had a good friend that gave me a much needed wake-up call. I learnt from my mistakes, planned properly this time and explored a different direction which is going decently well now.