Joy Wang or Jamus Lim

I have many goals for now, and many things to learn. One of the clearest things I want to work towards in the future is to make education in Singapore more creative and multi-faceted. For now, I’m trying to make my messy thoughts a little more coherent, and something that hopefully entertains or teaches you something small.

My approach to research is one of informed inquiry. The world is a complex place. As such, I believe in the utility of careful mathematical modeling, which makes problems to be analyzed explicit, lays out their limitations, and allows for the potential to yield otherwise counterintuitive findings.

But we must understand that there is no such thing as a 'waste' of time. Time is invested in different things, but instead of trying so hard to find returns in the form of money or love, let's rebuild our little personal time machines. And travel back to where we once were and rediscover the childhood that we so willingly lost but can never regain.

In Singapore, a country largely influenced by Confucian ideals, mental health is barely reaching the surface of attention. Welfare is much less of a thing here – unmarried single mothers in Singapore have no access to any grants available to widowed or divorced mothers, and can’t even get government housing until they’re 35 like other singles. In the US, a long list of grants are available to all single mothers, unmarried or not.

The first mechanism involves a reward for cooperating, where the rewarding party may be outside a given relationship. The second mechanism involves a punishment for defection, where the punishing party may be outside the relationship.

But then there are those friends whom, when we meet, we both pick up right where we left off. There's nothing magical about it. Just a meeting of minds, a mutual desire to remain as friends, and a genuine curiosity about the life of the other person. I am happy to report that I have a far larger pool in this category of friends than I do in the last - and to me, that is a clear sign that a simple decomposition of friendships into the polar categories of "there" and "ain't there" just isn't adequate.

And what drives me above all is making people happy, because being supported in being happy is a real privilege that I’ve experienced. It’s only because I’ve been given the freedom to live out my passions that I could keep going forward without fear, and I think it’s so important that everyone gets that chance.