The following is a letter from Lawrence Santiago, who received his MA in Philosophy from NUS in 2007.

Exactly two years ago, I was interviewed in Montreal, Quebec, Canada for the Trudeau Scholarship. The Trudeau Scholarship is Canada’s most highly coveted doctoral scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. The scholarship competition is open for Canadian students studying in universities in Canada and abroad as well for non-Canadians studying in Canada. Some claim that it is Canada’s answer to the Rhodes or Fulbright Scholarships. To get the scholarship, one has to be nominated by the candidate’s research supervisor, then by her Department, and finally by her University. By a stroke of luck and hard work, I was sent by my home university, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and was eventually chosen by external and selection committees of the Trudeau Foundation to be among the final 25 for an interview. I was finally chosen to be part of the final 15, the only non-Canadian in my cohort as well as the first to come from a Singaporean institution of higher education in the history of the scholarship.

In the morning of my interview, I put aside all my nerves and decided to leave the interview process to fate…(for the rest of the letter click here: http://blog.nus.edu.sg/philo/2011/03/24/lawrence-santiago-reason-and-passion-how-nus-philosophy-shaped-my-thinking-about-the-world/ )