The CapitaLand-USP Prize for AY2009/10 Semester 1 has been awarded to Ms Goh Huishan.
The Prize is awarded to a USP student who has excelled both in his/her academic and extra-curricular pursuits. It recognises achievements in multi-disciplinary inquiry and beyond-the-classroom activities. The Prize, valued at S$2, 500, is sponsored by CapitaLand Ltd per semester for three years. Below is a short write up on Huishan, focusing on her extra-curricular activities, her beliefs and her interests.
Huishan is a fourth year Honors student majoring in English language in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She is also an active member of the USP student body. Her passion for academic inquiry inspired her to take on editorial roles in several USP publications. Over the years, she had served as Chief Editor of PRISM, the USP Undergraduate Journal, after joining as one of the founding editors of the journal since 2007. In 2008, she was also co-editor of Conexus, an annual publication of the most outstanding essays from USP first- tier modules.
Beyond her academic pursuits, Huishan has in her a sense of social and environmental responsibility. As a strong advocate for Environmentalism, she has embarked on the Save that Pen@ NUS initiative as Project Co-director, working in collaboration with corporate sponsors and NGO, Global Village Foundation. Save that Pen@NUS strives to cross cultural and national boundaries by collecting used pens from the NUS campus community, and refill them for donation to educational facilities in rural Vietnam.
This initiative stems from Huishan’s firmly held belief in out-of-classroom learning. Her global mindedness was moulded by her experiences of Global Programmes, having undertaken USP initiatives such as “Harvard in Asia Programme (HCAP)”; “USP (NUS)-Stanford Summer Programme on Multiculturalism”; and “Global Study Programme on Contemporary Muslim Societies—a Tri-city case study: Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore”. Huishan was inspired by the level of community involvement in the Bay Area in the USA during her semester long exchange stint to the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. There, she volunteered as a writing coach at Berkeley High School. This global learning is brought back to Singapore, where she served as Vice Director of HCAP 2009, helping to organize a weeklong conference on Global Education.
Huishan enjoys travelling through the Southeast Asian region, and tries to fuse academic as well as personal interests through programmes such as the International Alliance of Research Universities’ (IARU) summer school, Southeast Asia in Context, as well as USP first tier module, The Politics of Heritage. Her second Independent Study report, Social Contexts of Foreigner Talk: a study of foreigner-local interactions in the tourist marketplaces of Bangkok, was borne from the IARU summer school.
