His account of that journey, delivered in a graduation speech and posted online, has reopened a national argument over whether Singapore’s high-pressure school system gives up too early on students who bloom late, the South China Morning Post reported.
Joel Tan gave the student address at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated PhD programs hooding ceremony on May 28, where he received a PhD in biological and biomedical sciences.
Growing up in Singapore, he wanted to study biology but was told repeatedly that it was not a realistic path for him. His middle-school grades were judged too weak for the demands of biology classes, so he was channeled into physics and chemistry, the subjects he wryly called the “easier” sciences in a line that drew laughter from the room.
His performance suffered because he was never given the chance to study what actually interested him, he told the ceremony, and he left high school with grades of C and D.
For a while he believed the verdict himself. He recalled failing twice to win a place at a university in Singapore before deciding, on the third attempt, to leave the country and study abroad. The University of Toronto took him.
Toronto changed everything, he said. There he sat in his first biology class and found mentors, laboratories, and a research community that let him picture who he could become. He went on to a master’s degree, then to Harvard.
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