Dr Tan Lai Yong

MPA 2012

Senior Lecturer, College of Alice and Peter Tan, National University of Singapore

Higher Education

From playing sepak takraw and cricket with migrant workers to bringing his students to the Jurong Fishery port at 1am, Lai Yong believes in the doing. At the NUS College of Alice & Peter Tan (CAPT), he teaches a module entitled “Hidden Communities in Singapore”. In this course, Lai Yong leads the class on field trips, going to MRT worksites and visiting PUB water engineering teams in the hours past midnight and Geylang’s lorongs to learn about the communities of the back lanes. He also has sessions where students can join ex-offenders who use street dance to keep youths-at risk away from gangs in low income HDB areas.

As Director for Outreach and Community Engagement at CAPT, his inclination towards the fringes of society is an undoubted asset, and possibly what defines him the most. “My mission and personal calling is to work with the poor and marginalised," he explains of his motivation to spend 15 years as a doctor in rural China. While there, he planned surgery camps, found innovative ways to educate the different minority ethnic groups on health and hygiene and even initiated planting walnut trees to raise farm income and reduce soil erosion. In recognition of his efforts and impact, numerous awards from the Chinese authorities were showered upon him.

While he is grateful to be in Singapore, Lai Yong embraces the need to step out of one’s comfort zone to live, learn and work alongside marginalised communities.

Spurred by this desire to "re-tool" and "re-learn", he enrolled at LKYSPP for a Master in Public Administration in 2011. During his time in school, he took up a module in energy systems despite lacking an engineering background. He ended up scoring a C for a paper on energy systems.

But the setback did not discourage him. "I learned so much about energy and engineering. If I wanted to score an A, I would have written about something I knew well," he says. "But I didn't come to LKYSPP to do something I already knew."