About Us

The USP-Stanford Summer Programme, which took place from 7th to 20th May 2007 across San Francisco Bay Area, California, was the reciprocal of an earlier programme by Stanford University that saw 15 of their students, led by Prof. Don Emmerson from the Spogli Institute for International Studies, on a two week exchange to Singapore. This time, however, it was Assistant Prof. Daniel Goh from the Sociology department who led 15 of us from NUS.

The programme, subtitled “Multiculturalism: Singaporean and American Perspectives”, was composed of academic seminars and guest lectures at Stanford and neighbouring University of California – Berkeley, field visits to community initiatives in underclass neighbourhoods like East Palo Alto, as well as a tour around the Google campus in the multicultural melting pot that is Silicon Valley. Between these, we also did our own research and fieldwork in preparation for a paper due after the programme, and as a finale, we held a forum to share findings and perspectives, comparing Singaporean and American mulTEE- and mulTY- culturalisms, with each other as well as Prof. Emmerson and his students.

On the whole, the programme was highly enriching. We were briefed to regard every bit of time and experience there as potential research material and duly took heed. While it meant, on a sly fallacy, that any experience we wanted we would call ‘research’, it also alerted us to how, for example, an apparently innocuous feature of urban landscape like a tourist spot could form rich material for observation and analysis. Through our interactions with various community leaders and academicians alike, we gathered useful insight and viewpoints to critically evaluate and help inspire in us creative alternatives in the multicultural project. Of course, we also relished the opportunity to socialise and travel. At the end of the programme, many of us decided to extend our trip for a week more, thus prolonging not only our academic excursion to the American west coast, but also the time spent satiating our wanderlusts.