Congratulations to the NUS Medicine Class of 2020 and 2021!
Published: 03 Jul 2021
3 July 2021 marks the 116th anniversary of the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and also the day where 293 of our students are officially conferred their Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS). They were joined at this year’s virtual commencement ceremony by 296 of their seniors from the Class of 2020, whose own ceremony last year was put on hold due to the pandemic.
Although it has been a tough and challenging period for all of us, we take heart in graduating our 115th and 116th classes of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who are ready for the challenges that lie ahead of them.
“Last year, the graduation plans had to be scrapped and the Class of 2020 was put to work immediately to ease the burden on our healthcare systems. Dear Class of 2020, I applaud your professionalism, commitment and perseverance. Though this Commencement Ceremony comes belated, I trust that it is even more meaningful now that you’re already in the workforce and understand the relevance and importance of what you have learnt during your studies with NUS,” said Prof Chong Yap Seng, Dean of NUS Medicine, in his address.
Indeed, the newly-minted healthcare professionals find themselves faced with an unprecedented work environment. Yet, they can be certain that the help is always at hand in the healthcare fraternity. Faculty and seniors have continued to model the importance of lifelong learning and the ethos of service to the community.
“I hope that after your graduation, you’ll continue to uphold the values of your School – Respect, Integrity, Compassion and Humility. Always remember to conduct yourself with humility, treat your patients with compassion and others with respect and integrity,” encouraged Assoc Prof Lau Tang Ching, Vice-Dean for Education.
We share stories of three of our graduands at this milestone in their lives.
Dr Nicholas Syn (Class of 2021)
Nicholas had received a rejection on his first application to NUS Medicine back in 2014, but this did not deter his pursuit of medicine. After his two-year stint in National Service at the Military Medical Institute, he affirmed his desire and aptitude for Medicine, and was eventually accepted into the 2016 intake of NUS Medicine on his second application.
Despite having to manage the hectic schedule of a medical student, Nicholas has managed to actively pursue his interest in research and acquired a reputation for being a prolific medical researcher. He has garnered impressive scores in commonly used metrics in research, with a H-index of 17*.
He has also had his work credited in prestigious medical journals such as Nature Communications, and most recently, a piece that demonstrated how people with severe obesity who undergo bariatric surgery can expect to live longer as compared to people who receive usual care was published in The Lancet, in which he is credited as first-author. He also has another first-author publication in The Lancet Oncology.
Nicholas credits his first mentor, Professor Goh Boon Cher, for shaping his outlook and desire to continue his pursuit of medical research.
“One of the lasting lessons I learnt from Prof Goh—and also my principal source of motivation to do research—is his belief in the ‘multiplier effect’ of doing medical research. When you treat a patient, you treat one patient. But when you do research, you treat 10,000 patients. Research is a form of ‘giving back’ to society, as thousands could potentially be helped through the discovery of a new treatment or diagnostic method,” said Nicholas.
In recognition of his effort, he received a few awards and grants as a medical student totalling around $50,000. These include the SingHealth Medical Student Talent Development (SMSTDA) Award ($7000) and Travel Grant ($3000), the NUH Junior Research Award ($6000), the Yeoh Seung Aun Prize ($1000), the Abbott Academic Excellence Prize ($1500), the NUS Medical Grand Challenge Change Maker Prize ($5000).
Nicholas hopes to specialise in transplant surgery, as he believes that the transplant of autologous organs from stem cell regeneration or 3-D bioprinting will revolutionise medical treatment paradigms in the coming decades. He believes that this ability to replace an organ on-demand will change how almost every textbook disease is treated. The promise of working on such cutting edge medical technology gets him excited and he aspires to play a leading role in these cutting edge fields.
* The H-index attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of a researcher’s publications. It measures a researcher’s impact on the research community based upon the number of papers published and the number of citations these papers have received. For example, a researcher with an h-index of 20 has 20 papers which have been cited at least 20 times each. In general, an h-index that matches the number of years a researcher has been working in the field is a respectable score.
Dr Tan Jun Xiang (Class of 2021)
The road to medical school was not a smooth one for Tan Jun Xiang. Instead, the first hard knock of his academic life came when he scored a modest 181 for his PSLE. Rather than wallow in self-pity, however, he resolved to do better after a successful appeal led him to enter his choice secondary school.
With the help of patient and encouraging teachers, the diligent teenager eventually graduated top of his cohort for the O-Levels. Despite having only studied biology in lower secondary as a Normal Academic student, he took up a teacher’s advice to pursue something he liked, and entered the popular Biomedical Science course at Singapore Polytechnic. There, he discovered a whole new world that would be the catalyst for his pursuit of a career in healthcare.
On an internship in Year 2 of polytechnic, Jun Xiang worked with a senior doctor who took him under his wing. The doctor allowed Jun Xiang to shadow him at work, and shared with him about life as a doctor. Upon graduation, although well-equipped to enter the workforce with a diploma, Jun Xiang applied to the National University of Singapore (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and was accepted.
Jun Xiang has also relished the opportunity to give back to the community in his time at NUS, participating in the student-led Public Health Service initiative, which offers free annual health screenings to local communities. In his third year, he became a committee member of the Tri-Generational Homecare initiative which teaches secondary school youths how to provide basic health monitoring for elderly beneficiaries.
Jun Xiang finds himself drawn to the idea of being an orthopaedic surgeon or an emergency medicine physician in future. His long-held wish is to go overseas to treat people from poorer communities who do not have ready access to proper healthcare once he gets his medical license.
Dr Sarah Tham (Class of 2020)
Sarah entered medical school, wanting to see the range of human emotion and experience, so that she could connect with and meet people at their moments of greatest need, grief and suffering – and yet celebrate with them in their moments of joy.
She has actively sought opportunities to be in close touch with her local community and communities beyond. Locally, she has volunteered with Assisi Hospice to care for the dying, tutored children from broken families at Chen Su Lan Home, participated as a case writer at her local Meet the People Session, and worked with Healthserve to organise health screenings for migrant workers held in their own dormitories.
Having previously picked up sign language before entering medical school, she co-founded the club SIGNapse to teach healthcare students sign language and engage with the deaf community. Since its inception in 2016, SIGNapse has taught more than 1,000 medicine, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry students. It has also offered free interpretation services at health screenings, in order to overcome the communication barrier and allowing the deaf to participate.
During her time at NUS Medicine, Sarah also served as the director of the Public Health Service (PHS) in 2017. It organises the largest annual student-run health screening in Singapore. In that year, PHS served approximately 1,100 Singaporeans with its comprehensive free screening and follow-up programme, and many more during its health exhibition.
Outside of Singapore, Sarah has also actively been involved in medical missions and humanitarian work in Ipoh (Malaysia), Kathmandu (Nepal), Nagaland and Lucknow (India), and Sangkhlaburi (Thailand). She has worked with children with HIV, victims of sex trafficking, lepers rejected by their families, refugees and minority groups. Her desire is to serve rural populations where basic healthcare and sanitation needs remain unmet. In 2018, she led a team of medical students and doctors to the slums in Lucknow, where they worked with a local organisation to provide education, women’s empowerment programmes and healthcare for slum dwellers, who were neglected by their own city.
More recently, she has explored the role of technology in medical systems and education. During her experience as the director of PHS, the team worked with NUS Computer Science graduate students to design a functional health-screening application that was used during the actual screening programme. This application has since paved the way for more objective analyses of screening data, and more streamlined follow-ups for participants.
She has also worked with Assoc Prof Tay Sook Muay from SGH and a team of students to design Medsense, a medical gamified education application that made use of natural language processing (NLP), which she presented at the European EC-TEL conference in 2018.
For all her efforts, Sarah was recognised as a recipient of the 2020 Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement; an award that recognises outstanding academic and non-academic achievements of post-secondary students, particularly those who have made outstanding contributions to the community and demonstrated the spirit of innovation and enterprise.
