The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major at Yale-NUS College attracts students with interests across all three fields. These profiles illustrate how the PPE major has prepared some of our recent graduates for career, life, and study after college.
Joan Ongchoco
Class of 2017
… the disciplines of philosophy and psychology come together for me. Both really just involve making and creating the concepts and frameworks through which we can explore and capture how we construct the beautiful and dynamic world around us. I feel so lucky I get to do that now at Yale.
Linus Seah
Class of 2017
PPE at Yale NUS worked well for me because it provided me with the flexibility of exploring my “riskier” interest in Philosophy while simultaneously taking on the more practical choice of Economics.
Liz Thai
Class of 2017
PPE gave me a good foundation for analysing what I might want out of life, both professionally and personally.
Joan Ongchoco
What are you up to now?
Ph.D. student in Psychology at Yale University.
How has majoring in PPE prepared you for life?
I still remember when Prof. Christina [Tarnopolsky] and I ended up spending six hours in her office talking about ideas spanning philosophy, politics, aesthetics, psychology and economics. By the end of the day, her whiteboard was filled with lines connecting ideas across thinkers—Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Adam Smith—and across disciplines. For me, the conversation we had then, exemplified my experience of sitting at the intersection of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Yale-NUS. My Economics training, taught me how to test assumptions and build models. In my Politics courses, I learned to look at how so much of who we are and how we think is reflected in the society we have built and are continuing to build. As for Philosophy — which of the three is probably the closest to my heart in one of the last classes I had with my capstone adviser, Prof [Simon] Duffy, we read a piece by [Gilles] Deleuze titled “What is Philosophy?” He notes: “philosophy does not contemplate, reflect or communicate, although it must create concepts for these actions or passions”. Though many other philosophers in the past and present might contest this, I find that for me, this encapsulates how the disciplines of philosophy and psychology come together. Both really just involve making and creating concepts and frameworks through which we can explore and capture how we construct the beautiful and dynamic world around us. I feel so lucky I get to do that now at Yale.
Linus Seah
What are you up to now?
I’m in a management program at GlaxoSmithKline and am currently serving a role in their procurements division. The main project that I’m currently working on involves reviewing the merchandising space across Asia, and then drafting a strategy to improve the status quo.
How has majoring in PPE prepared you for life?
PPE at Yale NUS worked well for me because it provided me with the flexibility of exploring my “riskier” interest in Philosophy while simultaneously taking on the more practical choice of Economics. For the record, the skills that Philosophy has equipped me has certainly been anything but “fluffy” and has held me in good stead in the professional world.
In contrast to the abstract mathematics or theoretical modelling that I so often found myself puzzling over in Economics classes — they were helpful in sharpening my mind, but definitely not directly applicable to my current job — the training in both written and verbal communication that studying Philosophy provided me has come in extremely handy in helping me to communicate more effectively with my bosses. Examples range from pitching new business propositions to the simpler but equally important task of sending out clear and concise emails (yes — “clear, concise, and precise” was the golden rule that our dear [Prof] Andrew [Bailey] constantly drilled into us; I even have it written at the back of my work notebook as a dear reminder.)
I think PPE worked well for me because taking either pure Economics or Philosophy would have probably driven me insane — I found them individually to be too intense over prolonged periods of time, and having the option of switching between Philosophy and Economics gave me some headspace and breathing room to switch between different modes of thinking while applying somewhat similar skills. This habit of applying different modes of thinking to solving problems has definitely been useful for me at work too.
Liz Thai
How has majoring in PPE prepared you for life?
PPE gave me a good foundation for analysing what I might want out of life, both professionally and personally. It gave me a lot of flexibility to study many different subjects that interested me but were not clearly linked, at least in any academic sense. It is a degree I would recommend for those looking for something beyond just a job; those who have a broad range of interests and are looking to explore them in a communal and structured setting with academic guidance. I am now a management consultant and have yet to specialise, but my degree has taught me to enjoy the adventure and be open to opportunities as they come, no matter what field they are in. Thus, it’s a good degree for life enthusiasts and potential entrepreneurs. Professionally, it has probably helped me the most by making me a more interesting person, therefore upgrading my soft skills rather than any particular hard skills.
