By Soh Ying Qi (18A01C)

If you had asked me in 2017 where I saw myself after graduating from JC, my answer would not have been “slumped in a chair in Parliament House, nursing a mild fever at nine in the morning”.

It was the annual Committee of Supply debates, and I was sequestered in a room alongside 40 other ministry officers. Normally, I’m wholeheartedly against the very idea of reporting to work sick. But the annual Committee of Supply debate is the single busiest event for any ministry; it’s the equivalent of tax season for accountants, Valentine’s Day for florists, and Black Friday for retail workers.

Which is to say: No one goes home until it’s over, especially not when you’re the co-writer of a speech that will later be delivered live in Parliament.

It wasn’t even noon, and I was already daydreaming about being asleep in my bed—really, anywhere but here. The lights were too bright. The room was too cold. My chest ached every time I coughed. I felt like I was wading through a jar of honey, slow and sticky and stuck.

Time seems to pass so strangely when you’re young. In less than a decade, I had gone from being a student journalist to a world-weary civil servant, and I could chalk it all up to one single thing: the unwavering conviction, made from the moment I joined Press in JC, that I was going to write for a living.

The Path of Most Resistance

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: “There’s no future in pursuing the arts and humanities.” If you’re not programming the next super-app, researching bleeding-edge cancer treatments or building self-driving cars, you can kiss your hope of a proper career goodbye—or at least, that’s all I ever heard as an arts stream student in JC.

But sometimes, you just can’t help yourself. I knew I was not cut out to be the next great scientific mind of my generation, but there was another part of me that thought I might just be able to make something of myself as a writer.

It was in Press that I decided to put this theory to the test, and that meant writing about pretty much anything and everything I could get my hands on. Between articles about sports finals and A Level results releases, I wrote about being terrible at Mandarin, my love of starchy tuberous vegetables and more than one treatise on the strange things that people type into the Press search bar. And I loved it.

As a writer, being given the freedom to write about almost anything you want is like being a child let loose in a candy shop. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I realise just how foundational that sense of autonomy and independence was in shaping the course of my life after JC graduation. 

For the first time in my life, I felt like I could hear myself in the things I wrote, instead of other people’s words I’d been taught to memorise and regurgitate. I realised that I could be different; I could be my own person. I could do what I wanted, starting with the one thing I really wanted to do: continue to pursue linguistics in university.

The Year 2019 B.C. (Before ChatGPT)

I’d wanted to write, and so I wrote a lot. (Such is the life of a humanities major.) A research paper on syllabic consonants in Singapore English. Argumentative essays on the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and the Kachruvian model of world Englishes. I’d wager that most uni students dislike academic writing; I quickly discovered I was not one of them. To me, writing essays wasn’t work—it was the very thing I had come to do.

Your uni years are typically considered one of the most consequential periods of your life, and for good reason: it’s where most people, fresh into adulthood and armed with newfound independence, make the choices that will determine the course of their early adult lives.

For this reason, it’s important to branch out and explore as many new experiences as you can. For me, one of the most significant was publishing a research paper in an academic journal (as first author).

It turns out that there’s a lot of work hidden behind the label “peer-reviewed”. I was a good student, but that was a far cry from being a seasoned researcher, and it was easy to feel completely out of my depth. Thankfully, I had great professors to shepherd me patiently throughout the whole process, and it’s only through their support and guidance that the paper was finally published, over a year after my supervisor had first floated the idea.

It’s ironic that even as someone who fancies themselves a writer, few words can describe the feeling of knowing that something you wrote is out there in the world. While writing this article, I found out that my paper has since been cited in four others. After years of citing just about every article ever written on Singapore English in my own assignments, it’s surreal to think of words that I wrote being read and cited in those same articles.

But that’s the beauty of the written word: it endures, waiting to be read by all those who will come after you.

On the Job from 9 to 5

It might have been surprising, then, that I decided against graduate school as I was coming to the end of my degree. But after four years of uni, I’d accepted that I wanted very different things out of life than an academic career could provide. I’d proven that I could write, but I felt ill-equipped to engage in the kind of high-level theorising and cutthroat competitiveness that it takes to succeed as a full-time researcher. I wanted a fulfilling, meaningful career, but I also wanted stability and a decent pay cheque. That was my first big life lesson as a young adult:

Figure out what matters most to you (and what doesn’t), and make choices that will allow you to achieve that.

Plus, there was an element of pragmatism underneath it all. (Let’s be honest: no matter how high my GPA was, I was not getting a five-figure job straight out of uni with a niche humanities degree.) I’d enjoyed my time training as a linguist, but few jobs required that kind of background. I decided I was better off in a generalist role that would allow me to develop a more versatile skill set.

That was how, three months before graduation, I found myself choosing between full-time job offers from three different ministries. Having interned at several different government agencies over the course of three summers in uni, I was well acquainted with it as a potential career.

For one, I still wanted to write for a living, and I knew there was plenty of that in public service: policy proposals, meeting minutes, literature reviews. I’d still be doing what I loved, just in a slightly different way. Lesson number two of being a young adult:

It’s okay to follow your passion, but make sure to be realistic about your options.

Luckily for me, I had known this from the start. Maybe I wouldn’t be a linguist, but I’d come away from it with three full-time job offers; not bad for someone who’d spent years being told the humanities were a dead end. This choice, at least, was much more straightforward. Sometimes, you just have a good feeling.

In two years of being a policy officer at the Ministry of Manpower, I’ve helped to shape Singapore’s labour laws and policies, learned the art of tripartite negotiations, and done a non-zero amount of math (a big deal for a humanities grad). And of course, I’ve written plenty, including two COS speeches, countless policy proposals and a never-ending stream of labour briefs, budget requests and talking points.

Mark My Words

It’s only now that I’ve come to realise a simple truth: the things you love might change in form, but the experiences stay with you and shape your life nonetheless.

In the past decade, I’ve reinvented myself from a student journalist to a beginner researcher to a full-time policy officer, and my love of writing has changed again and again, to the point where I look back on my old Press articles and all the papers I wrote in uni and wonder how they could have been written by the same person. I’m not a writer in the traditional sense of the word, but I still do plenty of it in my day job, just like my JC self always wanted. And if nothing else, it’s taught me one final lesson:

The course of your life is partially dependent on luck and circumstances, but what matters more is what you make of the opportunities that do come knocking.

As a fresh graduate in the public service, I’ve done my fair share of work that doesn’t exactly require the degree I went to school for. (If 17-year-old me had known that I would be writing summaries on the regular, I would have taken GP Paper 2 much more seriously.)

But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how these early experiences paved the way for more important responsibilities down the line. I’ve written memos that went all the way to Cabinet, presented at high-level tripartite meetings, and once staffed an international work trip less than a year into the job. And still I find myself learning something new every day.

What I’ve come to understand is this: Recognition is one thing, but ownership is something else entirely. It’s the feeling I felt each time one of my Press articles went up, the feeling that I couldn’t describe when my research article was published, the feeling I get when the job is done and I know my work has made a difference. It’s the feeling of having something that’s yours.

Sitting there in Parliament House with my burgeoning lung infection, in my last moments of lucidity, I pushed aside my latent discomfort and simply focused on the words being spoken in the chamber. My co-writer and I knew those words better than anyone else in the room. They were words we had first put to paper months ago, when all this had started. Words we had written for the whole nation to hear.

They say “the hand that holds the pen writes history”. Never had I understood it better than in that moment.

This Side of 25

As a young adult, you’re always learning, always growing, always changing. I’m not the same person I was when I graduated from JC. I’ve been back to RI a few times since then, and I’m always struck by how much has changed in my absence, like the world inside it has left me behind.

Then again, maybe I’ve outgrown it too. After everything, the most important lesson I’ve learned is that at the end of the day, your choices are your own—so make sure you’re choosing a life you want to live.

No one wants to be the victim of an untimely death, but if I was gone tomorrow, I could honestly say I’ve lived my life without regrets. I lived by my own choices; I chased things I was passionate about; I created a life I’m genuinely happy to live.

What more could I ask?