In the summer of 2025, I travelled to the war-torn country of Ukraine. Having a good two months between the International Criminal Court Moot and my Exchange+ in Rotterdam, I decided to go and see for myself the lives and events in a country so distant from Singapore.

What I saw and what I felt, was vastly different from the content on my TikTok feed or on mainstream media. The war is not the only definition of Ukraine. Amongst the food, history and culture, much thrives in the cities. Yet, my trip to Ukraine also challenged the assumptions I had about the country. Despite the country coming together against a common threat, political complexities and great diversities lay beneath what I assumed was a uniform veneer.

Getting In

First, getting into Ukraine required a few administrative tasks. For the purposes of my visa application, I had to submit proof of war insurance, sufficient funds to make the trip and a proper residence in Ukraine. My visa application took a couple weeks to process and because of the lack of English-based information, I had to guess some documentary requirements, such as the proof of financials. Flying into Ukraine was also not a possibility. The only way in was land transport - and given the size of the country (it is the biggest European country by land area), a bus ride from Warsaw to Kyiv would take 16 hours.

After a month of solo travelling around other parts of Europe, the day finally came to enter Ukraine. I waited eagerly at the Warsaw Central Bus Station at two in the morning, my fingers trembling both from visiting a country at war and the cold. Just two weeks before my visit, the Russians had bombarded Kyiv with the largest drone attack since the start of the war. I wanted to understand and see the plight of the Ukrainians first-hand, but I also knew that the war was a highly sensitive issue. As the bus arrived, I was surprised to see the many passengers headed into Ukraine. Family members hugged and kissed goodbye and the seriousness of entering Ukraine started to sink in.

Kyiv

As I got off the bus at Kyiv Central Bus station, the differences from the rest of Europe were immediately clear. Cyrillic letters plastered the information signs & building names. Grey, brutalist concrete shaped the city blocks while brighter colours defined the older pre-Soviet architecture. Instead of the trams I had seen in every European capital so far, yellow buses ran along the streets with electric cables. Grey clouds hung over the city, shielding it from the burning summer heat I had experienced in Central and Western Europe.

In spite of the ongoing war, Kyiv was surprisingly calm. Two weeks before I arrived, the news reported Russia’s heaviest drone bombing in Kyiv in the war thus far. And yes, I could still feel its looming presence. Soldiers were stationed along roads and at metro stations. Statues were boarded up with scaffolding and wood covers. My phone buzzed with missile and drone alerts on Telegram.

Yet, people went on with their lives as usual. As the metro thundered down the deep, Soviet-era tunnels, its carriages were packed with commuters rushing to and fro. Customers sat in cafés, working on their computers or catching up with old companions. Least of all, no one seemed to be bothered by the alerts. Even on one of the worst nights, while drones buzzed overhead and alerts were going off on my phone, none of the other roommates seemed bothered. Perhaps the war was now a “new normal” for the Ukrainians, just like how it was for us during COVID-19.

The architecture in Kyiv also revealed many wonders about Ukraine. In the Independence Square, a towering pillar with Ukraine’s Lady of Independence watched over the city centre. Once representing Ukraine’s post-Soviet independence and national pride, she was given renewed meaning by the platter of blue-and-yellow flags by the side of the square. I trudged slowly towards the many pictures placed on the grassy patches. “Demon” and “Recon” were among the nicknames for the many fallen. This was the real impact. A soldier, an individual remembered for his vivid personality by his fellow troopers, who died defending his nation. A volunteer strolled up, asking for donations to the military. I gave him some - in exchange, he gave me a couple of wristbands and a flag that bore the blue and yellow colours proudly.

Aside from the hallmarks of the war, Kyiv also boasted the rich history of the country’s roots. The St Sophia Cathedral, St Michael’s Monastery and old church grounds were evidence of traces of the Orthodox religion, their bright sensual colours plastered across the grey city blocks. In particular, a guide told me that the St Michael’s Monastery was a landmark from pre-Soviet times. The Communists’ intolerance towards religion tore apart churches and religious groups - but the Monastery was allowed to stay, albeit with restricted freedoms and finances. This was a further example of the country’s tumultuous history with the Soviets/Russians.

Despite the war, Kyiv bustled with life. Its citizens were up and about everyday - the same as I have seen in any other European cities. Amidst signs of the war, its history was told through the old Orthodox churches, to the Soviet-era infrastructure and now to the modern day shopping malls and landmarks. The summer vibe was vibrant, as people walked through parks and browsed the clothing racks at pop-up indie clothes stores. I was reminded, beyond the language and cultural differences of the people here, this was a very real city, with very real people, who were living through difficult times yet standing out in their own way.

Lviv

After a five-day stay in Kyiv, Lviv felt like a total opposite of Kyiv. Where the Kyivan streets were defined by grey, concrete blocks and grey clouds overhanging the city, the white-bricked, empire-like architecture reflected the bright summer sun in Lviv. In fact, its city centre reminded me more of Vienna than of Kyiv. And indeed, as I read the history of Lviv, I realised it had changed hands through four empires in the last one hundred years, including the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Yet, the war, though less noticeable here, was not completely absent. After I disembarked from the Flixbus at five in the morning, a loud air raid siren blared out from the central station. Deafening as it was, my fellow travellers at the tram stop did not even pass a glance towards the sirens. Truly again, the war had gone on for so long that it was normalised in their lives.

The blazing European summer sun beat down on me, as I walked through the old brick roads of the city. From the central train station to the clock tower, the white pillars reminiscent of Vienna . Unlike Kyiv’s yellow electric buses, trams ran through the city centre. The streets were a lot more lively too, given the proximity to the Polish border and the relative safety from the frontlines.

One of the main highlights of my trip was the Lychakiv Cemetery, a massive necropolis near the city centre. Because the necropolis was first built more than 200 years ago, it was not just a mere cemetery, but a testament to great figures and events in Ukraine’s history. The entrance was marked by large tombstones and mausoleums, celebrating famous writers, soldiers and politicians. Other parts of the cemetery were also marked out for major wars, such as the present Russian invasion, Polish Wars in the 20th century and World War II.

As I walked deeper into cemetery, I noticed a fresh(er) looking grave with many flowers and Ukrainian flags placed around it. I was curious to see such a sight – because the dozens of Ukrainian flags meant that the deceased was seen as a Ukrainian hero in the context of the present war. I quickly googled her name – Iryna Farion – but realised that this was a side of Ukrainian politics I had not encountered yet. Her life’s work and the controversy surrounding her reflected the deeper complexities of Ukrainian identity and the war.

From what I gathered on the internet, Iryna Farion was a linguist and politician who strongly promoted the use of the Ukrainian language. However, she was extreme in her views – to the point of advocating against the use of the Russian language in Ukraine and framing Ukrainian Russian-speakers as the enemy – despite entire cities such as Odesa primarily using the Russian language. Sadly, she was assassinated in 2024 by a shooter, allegedly influenced by Russian groups. This created a rallying point for Ukrainians against the Russian threat, hailing her as a patriot and a hero, despite her controversial politics. This flashpoint enlightened me on the complex politics in Ukraine amidst the war: the difficulty of distinguishing between fighting against the Russian state’s aggression and preserving and respecting local groups and languages in the country.

The Interviews with the People of Kyiv

Part of my journey into Ukraine involved discovering what the everyday Ukrainians thought of the war and their current circumstances. One of the persons I bumped into was Ruslem, an ex-soldier. Dressed in military fatigues and with a scruffy beard, Ruslem approached me while I was visiting the exhibition of destroyed Russian vehicles outside St Michael’s Monastery. He showed me the scars on his wrist - a mark left by a bullet whilst in combat. Evidently, through our conversation, he also bore much bitter hatred for Putin and Russia. Despite the language barrier, I asked him a few questions by fumbling through Google Translate (and some help from my Ukrainian friend Nikita).

Q: Why do you still remain in Kyiv despite the war?

A: First of all, my friends are fighting. My two brothers… one brother is currently missing, the other brother is in captivity.  So, I will help our guys until the end of the war. I will try to do everything possible to end this war and so that the war does not reach Europe.

Q: What are your opinions on the Ukraine war?

A: War is very bad. War kills people, war kills children, it beats women. Victory will be ours, we will not let the war reach Europe.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to say?

A: I warn you and your friends, you shouldn’t talk to Russians. First of all, they are ones who want war, they are bad people in general, they want to grab [the] whole Ukraine, whole Europe in their hands. Everywhere they go, they bring death. That’s why I warn you, your European friends, don’t talk to them. I thank you very much, Glory to Ukraine. Glory to our Heroes, Glory to people serving in Ukrainian army. We will not let them take anything anymore.

I also spoke to Ruslana, the desk girl at the hostel I was staying at. She told me that before the war, life felt carefree and much easier. But, it also felt that she had not lived without war, as if the war had lasted forever. When asked about what justice against the Russians would look like to her, she said that she would like to see a fair punishment for their war crimes, an admission of guilt and compensation for the harm caused to Ukraine and its people.

Despite the war, many others from outside Ukraine were also present in the city. I met a couple of Chinese sociology students studying in the Taras Lukashenko University. In spite of the war and their families’ worries, they decided to continue with their education since they were now in their final year. While they declined to comment on the war, they knew friends and professors who had family in the east of Ukraine, near the frontlines. It was difficult for them to contact their family members, and some even knew people who died. As foreigners, the Chinese students understood why many of their peers bore hatred towards Russia, but they could not reconcile the fact that the same friends who hated Russia also spoke Russian.

In the Taras Lukashenko Park near the university, I met two Americans on holiday in Kyiv, Dia and Johnny. In particular, Dia had returned to visit her mother and grandmother, who stayed on in the city. She wanted to return despite the war, because of the emotional connection that she felt with Ukraine.

These diverse views I encountered from both foreigners and Ukrainians that were now in Kyiv reflected how the war had impacted them. Mainly, it shows the resilience amid the dangers and difficulties created by the Russian war, where people still carry out with their daily lives and hold on to the connection they have with Ukraine.

Pieces of Russia’s Continuous Mistreatment and War Crimes against Ukraine

A large theme I noticed during my travels was the story of Russia’s continuous mistreatment of Ukraine and Ukrainians. In all of the modern war memorials, the start of the war was not dated as 2022, but as 2014 when Russia first invaded Crimea. This small detail drew my attention to the Ukrainian perspective of the war; they had not given up fighting against the Russian since they invaded in 2014, and saw the 2022 invasion as a continuation of Russia’s attempt to annex more territory.

Throughout Kyiv, there were many memorials to the fallen and small pieces of evidence that the Russians had come close to conquering the country in 2022. The Russians’ past presence manifested itself not only through the memorials, but also in the form of an exhibition of destroyed vehicles near the St Michael’s Monastery. The totalled and captured Russian military vehicles was undeniable evidence that Russian tanks had rolled through the streets of Kyiv. Photos of the Kyiv invasion (that are too gory to be shown here) depicted charred corpses of civilians burned by the Russian soldiers - evidence of Russian war crimes to be documented and prosecuted by the Ukrainian government.

The Russian invasion did not only stop at the threat to Ukrainian sovereignty. It also extended to attacks against Ukrainian civilians and even Ukrainian identity as a whole. During my visit to the Holodomor museum, an exhibit played a video interview of a teenager that was kidnapped from Kherson and brought to a reeducation camp in Russian-controlled Crimea. There, children were made to assimilate into the Russian state and any symbols or representations of Ukraine were destroyed. It was only through a rescue organisation that he was safely smuggled back to Ukraine.

Whilst at the International Criminal Court Moot, I had also listened to a talk given by the Ukrainian Ambassador to the Netherlands, Andriy Kostin. There, he gave details about Russian environmental war crimes, by kidnapping animals native to Ukraine and destroying the Kakhovka dam to flood the surrounding region. These acts by the Russian forces had revealed to me that this was not just a war of territorial conquest, but also to actively attack and diminish the Ukrainian identity.

Ukraine’s tumultuous history with the Russians did not just start with the 2014 invasion of Crimea. The Holodomor museum presented the history of the Holodomor, a famine engineered by the Soviets to starve and crush Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s.  Throughout the museum, it detailed the horrors of the Holodomor, showing how farmers had to hide grain underground to avoid confiscation by the Soviet authorities and locals detained for feeding their starving neighbours. The museum also added modern exhibits on the present Russian invasion (such as the video interview previously mentioned), implicitly showing the continuation of threats from the Soviets to the modern Russia state.

The Complex Politics in Ukraine

Everywhere I walked in Kyiv and Lviv, it was clear that the Russian aggression was universally recognised and Ukrainians felt it was part of their identity to resist the invasion. From the war memorials to the individuals I spoke with, there was a strong and stubborn resonance with Ukrainian identity and the state.

However, I also learned that Ukraine is not a monolithic state with only one language and ethnicity. From my understanding of Iryna Farion’s political advocacy and its background, other languages and ethnicities were scattered throughout Ukraine, including the Russian language and Russians. The confusion of the Chinese students at Taras Shevchenko University over the Ukrainians hatred of the Russian invasion while speaking Russian themselves also demonstrated the difficulty in distinguishing the Russian state from its culture, ethnicity and language.

Indeed, Ukraine is an incredibly diverse country with rich histories scattered throughout the country. I managed to try a local Crimean Tartar-based restaurant chain in Kyiv named Mustafir. There, I ate chebureki - a lightly fried wrap with lamb stuffings inside. I also chanced upon Krishnaists advertising a preaching by their guru in the middle of Podil square - which I was largely surprised to see such a sizeable denomination of followers of a religion that came all the way from India. In my limited time in Ukraine, these diversities reflected another form of Ukranian resistance against Russian aggression - to accept diverse groups of peoples in the face of an authoritarian state that crushed dissent and deviation from the government’s agenda. Coming from Singapore, where national identity is not limited to a singular ethnicity or religion, the complexity of national identity in Ukraine has made me reflect and question what it means to belong to a country.

Another complexity of Ukraine’s politics was that, even though the people were united and supportive of the defence forces, they were not necessarily all-accepting of the government’s policies. A week after I had left Kyiv, I learned that the largest protests since 2022 had assembled against a new bill in the government that stripped the anti-corruption bureau of its power. Although the nation was under martial law and most Ukrainians were supporting the war effort, it was still surprising to me that the people could retain independent thought and criticism of the government on other matters. To me, this ability to speak against the government’s policies even during wartime was a stark contrast to the Russian government’s silencing of political opponents.

Ukraine’s complex politics made me reflect on my own country, Singapore - a country in peace but also sharing similarities with these political issues. What elements of your personal identity define the national identity? Is it possible to remain patriotic to your country, while being harshly critical of your government? As I have observed these issues arise in a country deep in war, I hope my fellow Singaporeans and I ponder the same questions that apply to Singapore and the Singaporean identity.

Conclusion

As a final note, I want to express my gratitude to my Ukrainian friend Nikita and the individuals that spoke with me during my stay. Despite the severe lack of coverage of Ukrainian politics, culture and history in English media, their willingness to share their lived experiences and knowledge with me allowed me to better understand the country and the lives of the average Ukrainian.

While a lot of news on the war and the situation in Ukraine still slips by the headlines of major news outlets, the Kyiv Independent has been a great source of information on the current affairs in the country. I urge readers to follow this news network if they wish to learn more about the evolving situation in Ukraine.

This trip has taught me many great things about the human condition, Ukraine and relevant lessons that I can apply to myself. It is a difficult and risky journey to make to a country in war, but it is a greater difficulty and risk for the many Ukrainians that continue to fight for their country and their identity. I hope that by writing this article, many can grow to understand the Ukrainian struggle and reflect upon the relative peace that we are privileged with.

By Joshua Tan

by Nang Theint Hanni

A new semester back at NUS Law meant more modules to be conquered, more competitions to audition for, and a new culinary selection to fuel us on these pursuits — and I’m not talking about a new stall at the Summit. (Obviously.)

Those of us making our weary trek to our first lectures of the semester would’ve seen some colourful new additions to the Level Three vending machines. MrBeast, in all his Youtube altruism and dramatics, has sent his Feastables chocolate bars all the way to sunny Singapore and its law schools. Why exactly the BTC vending machines have been stocked with the chocolate is hard to say, especially with the eye-watering price tags (almost $17 for a bundle of three full-sized bars).

After briefly considering starting a MrBeast interest group so I wouldn't have to cover the cost myself, this writer incurred mild debt so that we may finally answer the question: is MrBeast chocolate any good?

At the time this good old-fashioned taste test was carried out (8 February), the flavour Deez Nutz was not yet stocked in our machines. (Interestingly, and of relevance to us at BTC, MrBeast had lost a legal battle to Florida-based snack company Dee's Nuts, losing branding rights to Deez Nutz. Deez Nutz would eventually mysteriously show up in our vending machines anyway.)

But no matter, here is a synthesis of some students’ rankings of the flavours Original Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, and Crunch:

Clearly, Crunch – which is milk chocolate with puffed rice – reigned supreme as the popular flavour. Maybe we have some desperation for CrunchTM after having our brains turned into mush every day at school. (Just me?)

Or maybe it’s that the chocolate is so simple in its composition that the puffed rice is a much-welcomed addition. The Bars seem to set themselves apart from others on the market with the simplicity of their ingredients list. Original, Milk, and Crunch have merely 4, 5 and 6 ingredients respectively, and maybe it shows in the taste:

"It's quite nice, but there are better chocolates out there.”

“Honestly…it’s really mid.”

“Obviously overhyped.”

“It kinda tastes like Cadbury?” (Four people said this. So did this online review.)

Personally, the idea of MrBeast creating organic, better-for-you chocolate is very amusing to me. This is after all a man who opened a restaurant that pays you to eat at it. But hey, don’t judge a chocolate-maker by his Youtube thumbnails, right? To better understand the MrBeast psyche, Justified reached out to a non-NUS member of the law fraternity, who is a self-proclaimed MrBeast fan.

“I never expected myself to be a MrBeast fan. However, he really is a Youtuber you can switch on with your head empty and expect to laugh and be amazed by his discoveries and games! Which is highly appreciated when most of your brain juices have been exhausted upon a hundred pages of readings. Unfortunately, he does pander a lot to maximalism and capitalism to reel in the views. More unfortunately, it is primally satisfying to watch. To justify my viewership, please be assured that he does use his clout for charity a lot of the times!”

Perhaps that is exactly what this venture means to MrBeast (real name “Jimmy”): a lucrative stream of income based on yet another addictive formula. Though it seems that for his audience, the aftertaste of self-loathing (be it from binge-watching or binge-eating) is overpowered this time not by zany altruism, but by a disarmingly healthy snack.

Because as overpriced and underwhelming as it may have seemed for our taste testers, the chocolate has certainly reeled in some long-term initiates, including the Justified editor charged with reviewing this article:

MrBeast is far from the first Youtube creator to launch a line of products ostensibly unrelated to his content (ie. not merchandise, nothing based on his image or a running joke). Veteran Youtuber nigahiga’s beverage brand Ninja Melk was releasing new flavours even amidst his upload hiatus; not to mention the Prime energy drink founded by Logan Paul and KSI. (Which, according to one taste tester, pairs well with MrBeast chocolate.)  

While consumable products have been largely uncontroversial thus far, previous Youtuber side-hustles have raised a variety of concerns relating to quality and authenticity, as creators leverage fans’ obsessions to inflate prices without necessarily delivering. Beyond borderline scamming buyers, Youtubers also exacerbate the issue of over-consumption when they come up with products whose only novelty is being associated with them, but that avid fans will buy in bulk anyway.

As a creator who regularly clocks video views in the millions, one can’t help but suspect that MrBeast’s tasty new creation might be one such cash-grab. After all, it was not that long ago that he was making burgers.

When asked about this, our consultant MrBeast fan had this to say: “Well, he is an entrepreneur who just has the rarer privilege of tapping into a pre-existing, ginormous market base (his audience). I don't think it's a particularly insidious undertaking because a man has to earn his money. Don't hate the game, hate the system, and chocolate is one of the relatively harmless products you can sell (I am not a diehard Beast fan and have not checked on its manufacturing origins). So no, I don't think it's too awful a venture.”

Additionally, MrBeast claims to regularly make losses on the videos he posts on his main channel, so maybe the chocolate simply enables him to keep making quality, charitable content. Like a struggling actor waiting tables in Hollywood.

If that’s the case, Deez Nutz and gang represent a rather noble endeavour indeed — one that we can perhaps support once in a while with our choice of mid-lecture snack.

A few years ago, at a family function, I bumped into a married couple. They seemed completely happy and at ease with each other, just like any other couple. I was surprised after they mentioned off-handedly that their relationship was the result of an arranged marriage.

The couple shared that they had not known each other beforehand before their families set them up, and they were married to each other after just a handful of meetings. They had only gotten to know each other well after they had gotten married.

They were both Indian, and Indian citizens, and the way they described the process of an arranged marriage matter-of-factly.

“Arranged marriages are very normal in India," they said.

From my perspective as a Chinese person living in Singapore, the idea of an arranged marriage was surprising. Most Indian people in Singapore, as far as I knew, got married after meeting each other and dating. Family opinions and approval played an important role, and relatives did play a part sometimes to set people up. But I thought that the process of meeting each other, getting to know each other, and deciding whether to date and later get married was a process left largely up to the couple themselves.  

I write all of this to provide the context for what is coming.

So, I happen to be currently based in London, where I am doing my exchange programme at King’s College. And one of the really nice things about being in London is that it is a truly diverse city, with communities of people from all over the world in great numbers.

As it was, I was studying in the Law Common Room within the King’s College campus when someone mentioned that the King’s College London India Society was organising a ‘matchmaking’ session featuring none other than ‘India’s Number 1 Matchmaker’, Sima Taparia.

For those who are unfamiliar, Sima Taparia (or Sima Aunty) as she prefers to be called is a rather famous woman, as the host of the Netflix show, ‘Indian Matchmaking’.

Indian Matchmaking is a Netflix reality TV series that debuted in 2020. It follows 'Sima Aunty', as she is fondly addressed as, as she seeks to set up Indian couples from all over the world in arranged marriages. But there’s of course, a twist.

"In India, we don't say 'arranged marriage' ... there is marriage and then love marriage,” Sima Aunty proclaims in the first episode of the series. “The marriages, they are between two families. The two families have their reputation and many millions of dollars at stake. So, the parents guide the children, and [facilitating] that is the work of a matchmaker."

This show generated quite the buzz, attracting media attention from international media outlets, and has been renewed for 3 seasons thus far.

Sima Aunty even released her own song.

I had watched the show for a bit when it first came out in 2020, but quickly forgot about it, since reality TV shows were never really my thing. But the mention of Sima Aunty coming to London brought all these memories right to the forefront of my mind.

The first reaction I had was one of surprise. The KCL India Society somehow managed to get someone who has their own Netflix show, down for one of their CCA events. I guess in London things work differently here.

The second thought I had was: This might actually make a pretty good Valentine’s day themed article.

So, in a moment of pure madness, I decided to drop a private Instagram message to the co-president of the KCL India Society.

To my surprise, the co-president, a student named Sahil, agreed to let me cover the event.

One of my friends from an ad hoc study group in the Law Common Room, decided that she wanted to tag along with me for the event as my ‘assistant’. She was a Spanish girl named Aitana. Somehow, she had heard of Sima Aunty too, and even composed a poem for the occasion.

On the day of the event, my ‘assistant’ and I went down to one of the school auditoriums for the event. There was a huge crowd of people queuing to enter the venue. As it turned out, you had to pay £17 (S$ 28.97) for a ticket to enter the event. When we got to the front of the queue, we just showed the student doorman the message we received from the India Society co-president, and he waved us through without us needing to pay for a ticket.

Entering the venue, I saw that some had dressed very elaborately for the occasion. Another thing I noticed was that a large majority—possibly about 70% of the attendees were female. The vast majority of the students who attended the event were of South Asian descent, but I did spot a few non-South Asian people at the event.

Settling into my seat, I struck up a conversation with one of the attendees.

What, I asked, did she think about matchmaking as a method of potentially finding a partner?

“A few years ago, I would have never considered being matchmade with someone else,” she said.

“What has changed now?” I asked.

“People on dating apps are truly disgusting and terrible,” she replied.

“With matchmaking, at least, there is no anonymity,” she elaborated. “Because the families are all part of the matching process, there’s at least some filter y’know?”

“So would you be looking for a potential partner at this event?” I probed.

“Nahh, I’m just here to support my friend. Besides,” she sighed, “I’m a PhD student, so I’m older than everyone here, probably. In Indian culture, it's still such that guys would not want to date women who are older than them. I’m also a Muslim, so a lot of Hindu families also will not accept their sons marrying or dating a Muslim. There are many such difficulties.”

At this point, Sahil, co-president of the KCL India Society, took to the stage to enthusiastically announce the arrival of Sima Taparia.

Sima’s theme song began blaring on the loudspeakers. To loud cheers, Sima Aunty and her husband made their grand appearance, dancing and lip syncing to her theme song down the stairs to the stage, while an entourage of KCL India Society members doubled as back-up dancers for her as she slowly made her way to the front of the room.

It was quite the entrance.

How the ‘matchmaking’ event worked was that you could sign up as either a ‘participant’ or a ‘spectator’. As a participant, you had to provide a profile of yourself and what you were looking for in a partner, which would be compiled into a ‘biodata’ (This, by the way, is also how Sima Taparia matches couples on her show).

All the female participants first lined up on the stage and presented their ‘biodatas’, after which the male participants would go up 1 by 1 to present their ‘biodatas’. The girls would then be asked if they would be willing to go out with the guy by raising a rose that they had been given. If a guy was lucky enough to have more than 1 girl pick him, he would be able to choose the girl he wanted to go out with.

At the end of the event, the spectators would be allowed to vote for who they thought was the ‘best’ couple of the show, who would win a free dinner date.

-

It soon became clear during the event that Sima Aunty was not really doing any active matchmaking, but was more playing the role of a fun variety show host. She introduced the participants, invited them to talk more about themselves, and made quips as the participants presented their biodatas.

Sima Aunty constantly reiterates in her show (and continued to do so at the event) that one cannot have too high expectations of their partner (‘You cannot expect 100% from your partner. By staying together, you need to make 100%!’), she also encourages the would-be matches to be honest with the type of person they are looking for, and the type of people they are.

This honesty did lead to some interesting biodata traits, however.

One of the guys biodata stated ‘I am still dependent on my mum for clothes’ (hits real though), earning a quip from Sima Aunty.

‘That’s not good’, she said, with perfect comedic timing.

The event was rather fruitful, with most guys managing to get at least one of the girls to pair up with them. For one participant, however, he wasn’t so lucky. None of the girls raised their roses for him.

‘He honestly seems like such a nice guy though,’ the PhD student I was sitting next to commented wistfully.

Soothing over any potential awkwardness or embarrassment, Sima Aunty immediately piped up, “Don’t worry, I will find a girl for you!’ She then went into the crowd of spectators for a few minutes, before emerging with a girl several minutes later who was willing to go out with that participant. Loud cheers ensued.

Another participant, later in the event, came up. He was rather tall, and you could tell that he probably spent some time in the gym. He had a certain swagger about him.

“Oh gosh,” the PhD girl next to me whispered. “That’s a red flag right there”.

4 of the girls participating in the event raised their roses for him.

“Maybe it's not the dating apps,” she remarked later, “It might just be society in general.”

The night was capped off by a Q & A session with Sima Aunty, where she mostly gave anecdotes and bits of wisdom that she frequently dispensed from her show, such as the story of how she and her husband got together (‘It was an arranged marriage that required both of them to adjust to meet their needs’), or what she thought were important ingredients to a long-lasting marriage (‘Family background of the boy and girl is very important!’), or what one should look for in a romantic partner.

After that, the event wrapped, and Sahil invited the spectators who had pre-booked a picture with Sima Aunty to come forward.

I went forward, not for the picture (it would have cost £3 (S$5.11) to book that picture), but to thank Sahil for letting us into the event. I tried to stand as far away from Sima Aunty as possible so as not to photobomb anyone, but Sahil warmly led me to Sima Aunty.

“This is Samuel, he’s an exchange student from the National University of Singapore and he’s covering the event for his school magazine,” Sahil introduced.

“Ahh, National University of Singapore,” Sima Aunty said, “My show is very popular in Singapore. Popular in Singapore and Malaysia. My show is in 190 countries.”

Sahil helped to snap a few pictures of Sima Aunty and me. Given how warm everyone was, I decided to see if I could ask Sima Aunty some questions.

She agreed, and I proceeded to ask her for her opinions on arranged marriages in India, as well as her insights on the practice.

“Yes, [arranged marriages] are increasing. It’s not just about the individual getting married, but about two families coming together," she answered. "In India, the families are very important, and it's not just about the individual getting married.”

Sima’s husband piped in at this moment, “Also, if there are any problems, the family can help to resolve it together.”

I asked her what she meant by ‘family background’. In some international media reports of her show, a criticism levelled at her was that ‘family background’ was code for casteism or wealth exclusivity.

Sima’s response however, was far more measured.

“A stable family is important, because children will take on the values of their parents. If the family is messy, parents always arguing etc, the children’s lives will also be messy,” she explained.

What then, I asked, about those who came from broken or difficult families?

“Most importantly it is about whether their heart is good,” Sima responded. “Whether the children’s heart is good. If it is, then it's ok.”

Reflections:

Before attending this event, I had never gone for any matchmaking events before. But as far as I could tell, it did not seem all that different from how dating shows or set-ups would work.

It was a far cry from my previous impressions on what arranged marriage was like. The ‘Indian matchmaking’ event I had gone for seemed more like a fun, get-to-meet-people type of event. Furthermore, the event stressed that there was no pressure on any of the participants to get together with anyone.

“It’s a fun thing, completely without pressure," Sahil explained. “If [the couples] do not work out or do not get together, that’s completely fine.”

“We invited [Sima] because her show is very famous in India, famous for matchmaking many Bollywood couples, and it’s a fun event to hold this Valentine’s day,” he elaborated.

Indeed, even in Sima’s own show, upon matchmaking the couples, she leaves it to them to go out, get to know each other, and see if they want to continue being together.

At the end of the night, Sahil announced that Sima Aunty and her husband would be leaving the event. Loud cheers greeted them from those who were left in the auditorium as they waved goodbye.

They were escorted by the India Society committee members out of the building, where a car was waiting for them. Almost like a valet, he held the car door open, while Sima and her husband, ever the celebrities of the evening, continued waving to the leaving event attendees and shook the hands of the committee members. Finally, they bundled into the car as it drove off into the night.

Editor's Note: Justified would like to thank the KCL India Society for being such welcoming hosts and letting Samuel cover this event!

In 2023,  4 NUS Students decided to compete in a Japanese-language mooting and negotiation competition.

INC Sophia is a mooting and negotiation competition held annually at Sophia University in Tokyo, consisting of both English and Japanese Language components. It is typically contested by law schools in the Asia-Pacific region. While NUS Law typically only fields teams in the English component, last year,  4 students decided to take on the unique and somewhat insane challenge of competing in Japanese as well.

Their experience, I think, highlights the capacity of us as students to take on unique opportunities and excel in them, and perhaps makes us reconsider what success as a university student could look like. For that reason, their story is one worth telling here.

This is part 2 of a 2-part story. Read Part 1 here.

“Would you say this was something of a week from hell?” I asked.

“Actually, it was the best week of my year,” Karen replied.

After the end of Karen’s finals, was when the rush of competing in INC Sophia truly kicked in. She had completed her exam on 1 December. Within 4 days, the team would have to write a 2-page rebuttal memo to their arbitration opponents’ memo and write a 12-page negotiation memo, all in Japanese. The day after, they were scheduled to fly off to Tokyo, and 2 days later was the start of their competition. They had not written a word of both memos, nor had they properly conducted any benching sessions. They were also not at full strength because Phyllis still had her Contract mid-terms and was not able to assist.

All of this and they were 7 days out from the competition.

Their initial plan was a good one: spend just a day writing their rebuttals before focusing on the negotiation component, reflecting the 50/50 scoring weightage between the 2 components. But this did not come to pass. They instead spent three of the four days they had on the rebuttal memo as they once again struggled with translation issues. By 4 December, the team realised they would have to pull an all-nighter at BTC to rescue their memos.

Consider the context: this was at the end of a long semester of constantly working on their arbitration memo (as seen in Part 1) and finals. Everyone was exhausted. To make matters worse, Karen made the ill-advised decision to go clubbing a couple of nights before (“She just refuses to compromise on anything,” interjected Phoebe, rolling her eyes).

Karen had bought the tickets way back in October when she had assumed their preparation would be more well put-together and her finals had just ended, but what happened was that she ended up trapped outside The Marquee at 2 am due to road closures for the Standard Chartered marathon. She then somehow managed to crawl her way back home at 4 in the morning to continue working on the INC Sophia memos.

As anyone who has pulled an all-nighter would know, these were occasions for strong emotions and big surprises. Opening their negotiation confidential for the first time was a big shock for them, as they were promptly stumped. This resulted in a panic call with Prof Sam Tang.

“We didn’t even know what the negotiation problem was asking of us,” Phoebe related, “we couldn’t even find what the dispute between us and our opponents were.”

As they worked desperately into the night, a second surprise arrived. This one was far more pleasant, with their mutual friend Kimmie Tan showing up unannounced with bags full of Tiong Bahru Bakery pastries.

With the encouragement of these delicately crafted confections, they completed their memos in English at 5 that morning, before somehow managing to translate all of it into Japanese by the deadline at 11 a.m.

But that was only the beginning. After trying to catch a few hours of sleep, the team rushed down into the city for their first benching session the same evening, trying to cook up a passable script along the way.

It was a disastrous spar. It turned out that it was not really possible to ‘wing’ a legal oral submission in a third language on the fly with 2 hours of sleep. It was so bad that Prof Alan could not really give any feedback except to ‘prepare more’.  But there was little opportunity left to do so.

The next morning, Phoebe flew off to Japan, barely managing to pack her clothes in time. Kenshi, Karen, and Phyllis were scheduled to fly off in that same evening, but managed to squeeze in one more benching session at a Japanese Big Four Law firm. This time, they performed somewhat better, and even attracted praise from the associates there for having the courage to compete in a foreign language. With the commendations ringing in their ears, they rushed back home to grab their luggage.

Karen was running late when she received a text from Prof Alan.

“Have you printed your bundle of authorities?” he asked.

“Yes,” Karen replied. She paused. “We didn’t print out the PICC commentary though.”

For context, the PICC commentary was a 400-page Japanese legal commentary on the governing law for their arbitration round.

“Print it.” Prof Alan shot back, with such an air of finality about it that Karen could feel the sternness through her phone screen.

Karen’s Grab driver was waiting for her, so she ordered her younger brother to print out the document. And so it was that Karen waited with an increasingly irate Grab driver, as her brother ran from the printing shop with a 400-page legal document, placed it into her open luggage on the floor, and off she went to Japan.

Japanese (mis)adventures

The sun was just about rising when Karen and Kenshi touched down in Japan the next morning. Kenshi, however, was not. He slept poorly on the plane, and in general, he had never gone so long without a proper rest. Bleary-eyed, he trundled up to Karen at the baggage claim.

“Have you gotten all your luggage?” he asked wearily.

Karen was holding on to a single tiny backpack that she hand-carried onto the plane.

“Yes,” she replied sarcastically.

Kenshi blinked for about five seconds. “You mean you managed to stuff all your clothes into that backpack?”

Karen was exasperated. This man was gone. ‘We are so screwed for this competition’, she thought.

It must be noted that at this point, 2 days out from the competition, the INC Sophia Japanese team still had not written their oral submissions yet. The logical action for them upon touching down would be to get caught up on their sleep, maybe have a nice meal, and start working on their problem with a fresh mind. But in the same way that people suffering from hypothermia have the sudden urge to tear off their last warm clothes just as they are about to freeze to death, the team decided to explore the neighbourhood around their hotel.

To clarify, they were not going about seeing the sights or living life to the fullest. Rather they wandered in circles around their Yotsuya neighbourhood for hours on end. It was only after Prof Alan and Prof Sam brought them out for dinner that night, and forced them all to eat something, that they seemed to regain some human function. Obviously, that was not a productive day for them.

By the next day, the enormity of what they still had to do hit them. They still had to write their oral submissions and plan for their upcoming negotiation, with their competition starting in 1 day. Thus, they hunkered down in the meeting room of their hotel to try and crank out their submissions in Japanese.

For Phyllis, she had never even written a submission in English before, having just completed her stat memo in LARC. Yet she took the challenge of writing the opening and closing statements on gamely, basing what she wrote off her teammates’ work. She felt bad for the fact that she had been absent for large parts of the preparation process and was determined to scale the steep learning curve facing her as quickly as possible.

Although working on submissions was a grim and wearisome task, it was not as though the team did not have a good time. Nor were they always particularly focused on their task.

One of Karen’s friends brought his shiba inu down to the team’s hotel for dog-petting therapy in the middle of the afternoon. Karen then went on a 2-hour ‘mental health walk’ with said friend and dog. This meant that by 6pm the night before the arbitration round, Karen’s script was only half-written, and the team’s negotiation prep was non-existent.

But Karen had had enough.

“I can’t do this any longer,” she told Prof Sam.

Prof Sam replied, “Well, I’m going out for a drink.”

And so, Karen left the hotel to join Prof Sam at a bar. Phylllis tagged along as well. That bar was no ordinary bar—it served an exceptionally smooth sake which had a royal warrant on it, meaning that they were literally consuming drinks fit for an emperor.

Of course, that did nothing for Karen’s productivity, whereupon returning from the hotel went for a late-night Kombini run with Phoebe, followed by a 2-hour heart-to-heart talk with her. That meant by 6 am of the day of the competition, and yet another night of little sleep, Karen still had not written her oral submissions.

What happened next was a frantic scramble on Karen’s part. But while such a lifestyle was probably not the best for Karen’s physical and mental well-being, it somehow seemed to work for her. As her mind went into overdrive, the difficulties, and obstacles in writing the script seemed to magically melt away, and she completed the script that she was struggling with for days in 15 minutes.

Competition Day 1: Playing in an Away Game

As dawn broke upon the first competition day, the INC Sophia Japanese team was utterly exhausted. They had put in a great deal of effort just to get to this day, but now they actually had to moot in person. The team were literally playing an away game, with so much stacked against them. They were playing in a foreign country, the home turf of their competitors, in their language, and with the judges all from said country. And this was the first time they, or anyone from NUS Law for that matter, had ever done something like this.

“Historically, NUS in sending English teams has become comfortable with uncertainty as a source of advantage - the confidence to bulldoze most opponents with sheer language ability,” Prof Alan explained, “The Japanese team [was] basically in the opposite position: uncertainty becomes disadvantage.”

Prof Sam added, “I cannot imagine sane law students from other law schools deciding to do this on their own”.

Indeed, most foreign teams who participated in the competition did not send a Japanese team. Team Australia used to. But they were a well-oiled machine. They had a pre-competition, a special selection process from all Australian universities, and institutional support. And they gave up on sending a Japanese team this year. Team NUS’s Japanese team, in contrast, was an eclectic jumble of personalities that were running on fumes.

Quite literally so, as Karen downed six cups of coffee at one go before the competition.

But all the team members had a rather indomitable spirit because their experience had already been so unique that they did not care, or expect, to win the competition.

So, they just had fun.

Most of their Japanese competitors reacted with surprise when they saw the Singapore team. They usually reacted with some variation of, ‘Why would you choose to put yourself through a legal competition in Japanese?’ But the tone was generally one of friendliness and collegiality, being more than willing to make friends and exchange contact details.

Karen was speaking to one such female competitor during one of the competition’s socialisation events, who she could not help but notice was rather attractive and well put-together. The competitor however, had a very unassuming demeanour. It was only after exchanging social media details that Karen realised that she had a verified Instagram page and tens of thousands of followers. The competitor that she was talking to had been the winner of ‘Miss Kimono Japan’.

For the arbitration round, the NUS Team went up against Osaka University, one of the top law departments in all of Japan. Despite the apparent mismatch in abilities, the NUS team more than held their own. The scripts that they had prepared quickly went out of the window, with legal questions coming thick and fast from the judges, while simultaneously rebutting ir opponents’ points.

But somehow, all of them managed to give strong and coherent responses in Japanese.

There was a particular moment in the round that stood out, when the NUS team sought to back a point in their legal argument. It was a technical point on the probability of ‘G4’ space storms occurring, and the NUS Team cited an English-language research paper to support their point, and their opponents had no response. The research paper had never been published in Japanese. It was thus the melding of their expertise in both languages that allowed them to perform during the competition.

At the end of the round, each team had 15 minutes to prepare a closing submission that summarised all the points covered during the round. Karen, Phoebe, and Phyllis had taken notes during the round, in a mix of Japanese and English, and passed said jumble of points to Kenshi to translate into a coherent Japanese submission. For a moment, Kenshi looked at them in shock, his eyes glazing over. But that moment passed, and he quietly but steadily translated it into a coherent Japanese script. It would have taken him 4 or 5 hours less than a month ago, but his abilities had improved to the point that it just took him minutes.

“[Kenshi] was reliable throughout,” Prof Alan commented to me.

“But he kind of became the punching bag/saikang warrior for the entire team, true to his Hwa Chong roots,” he added.

Despite having given the NUS team a hard time during the round, the judges were full of praise for all of them at the end of the round. In particular, they were impressed by the team’s courage and gumption to put themselves through competing in Japanese. One of the judges even personally gave his name card to each of the team members afterward, telling them to ring him up if they ever wanted an internship in Japan.

Competition Day 2: Going down in ‘a [moderately] expensive, fun blaze of glory’

By their own estimation, the team had done rather well for the arbitration round. But it was also true that they had spent a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time on their arbitration round at the expense of their negotiation preparation. Reaching back at their hotel after an incredibly busy day, in an incredibly busy week, in an incredibly busy month, and in an incredibly busy semester, they had yet another late night to look forward to.

They did manage to get through about a couple of hours of preparation, but Karen could not take it any longer. She had been dialed up to eleven for a long time and the adrenaline had drained out of her after the arbitration round. She told her teammates that she had to get some sleep and suggested getting up early at 6 the next morning to continue their preparation.

Karen did not get up at 6. She crashed that night and slept through all her alarms, eventually getting up at 10.

The negotiation round was slated to begin at noon.

Additionally, they all had to check out of the hotel that morning, and she had not packed.

Thus, as was characteristic for Karen at that point, she had to go into a frantic rush. Fortunately, they did somehow manage to pull out another minor miracle, and completed their negotiation preparation in time, although they felt it was far from the standard of their arbitration preparation.

Arriving at the competition venue, a special feature of this negotiation round was that each team had to present their negotiation plan to the judges, something almost like preparing a pitch deck.

Their opponents, Meiji University, had prepared an incredibly slick, unique, presentation that one of the judges later described as “possibly the best presentation I have ever seen.”

The NUS Team, meanwhile, only had a PowerPoint presentation which they cranked out in less than 10 minutes that morning..

It was not the best of starts.

The round did not go particularly well, either. The Meiji university team had thought through what they wanted to do. They began the negotiation round by presenting to the NUS team on a piece of paper a list of proposed outcomes for the negotiations. When the NUS team rejected it (as they should), pointing out a whole list of unaddressed concerns, the Meiji team merely smiled.

“Ah,” one of them said calmly, “we have a solution to that.” And he pulled out another piece of paper with an alternative set of solutions that conceded most of the contentious points to them.

It was not easy to negotiate because while one could prepare submissions and anticipate likely questions for an arbitration, doing a negotiation required spontaneity. That was difficult for the team to do in Japanese. Particularly, they needed to get the right honorific registers in addressing their opponents, while utilising a different one for themselves. Trying to do this while balancing four or five technical points on the intricacies of satellite launch agreements required quite a bit of mental gymnastics.

Furthermore, the NUS team was not prepared for an opponent that was quite so pliant. The Meji team were incredibly polite throughout, speaking very slowly to make sure that the NUS team could understand and follow the conversation, while the NUS team spoke slowly out of necessity. Yet they had come to an agreement half an hour before the negotiation was scheduled to end. The judges seemed surprised.

“I have never seen a negotiation go quite so well before,” one of them commented.

The Results

At the end of the competition, all the competitors and coaches filed into the auditorium where the results would be announced. An old Japanese man walked on stage to announce the results. The individual category results, which were grouped by language, would be announced first.

The Japanese language categories for best arbitration and negotiation performers were announced, both won handily by Japanese universities. No surprise there.

The NUS English teams hoped to win at least one of the English language categories. As always, the NUS English teams had done rather well. Winning one of the English competition categories would thus be an important signal as to how well all the teams did overall and might even be the only chance to have some sort of showing in the competition.

They did not win.

That was not a good sign, and most of the NUS competitors began to have the sinking feeling that NUS might return empty-handed for the first time.

Not the Japanese team though. “We had absolutely no expectations,” Phoebe said.

Now came the overall scores.

“Seventh place goes to….Meiji University!” the old man exclaimed.

Seated several rows from Phoebe, a young man burst into tears. He was the coach for the Meiji University team,

That was the team that the Japanese team had gone up against for the negotiation round, and it was an opponent that they had thought they had done badly against. If they had gotten seventh, Phoebe thought, that was probably it for NUS’s chances.

“And in sixth place, it is…..” the old man paused for dramatic effect, “National University of Singapore!”

A single hoot of joy came from the crowd. That was Prof Sam. Everyone in the auditorium looked at her in surprise before resuming their polite applause.

As for the NUS Japanese team, they were simply shocked. Not shocked out of joy or disappointment, but just shocked in general. “We had managed to place in the competition?” was the prevailing thought.

They were all still in a daze when an announcer called for each team to send a representative on stage to give a thank you speech. Before he knew it, Kenshi found that he had been arrowed to be NUS’s representative and stumbled onto the stage. Under the bright glare of the stage lights, he suddenly heard someone shout from the crowd.

“Do your speech in both Japanese and English!” it shouted. (It was later found out during the process of writing this article that it was Phoebe who shouted that).

Kenshi had not prepared anything to say, but ever the reliable man, somehow belted out a perfectly composed speech in both Japanese and English.

“Is this how reliable people do it?” Prof Alan commented, “Their screw ups work out great?”

Great Expectations?

By the time I had met the INC Sophia Japanese team to interview them for this piece, nearly a month had passed since the competition. They had just returned from their holiday in Japan (“It was so fun” Phoebe exclaimed. “Kenshi regretted extending his trip to Japan only by a week,” Karen interjected), and they all had some time to reflect on their experience.

6th place, objectively speaking, was not a particularly great result, by the past performances of NUS at the competition. And that ranking belied the fact that the English teams had pulled up the overall score. Or to put it more bluntly, the Japanese team’s scores pulled down the English team’s average.

“If we had competed solely in English and we had gotten 6th, yes, obviously we would be disappointed,” said Phoebe, “But the fact was that we were doing something completely unprecedented, and with such a disadvantage, competing in Japanese, that I did not have any expectations on result going in. I think all of us were really there for the experience.”

“Although I do feel a bit bad for the English teams this year…” her voice trailed off.

Throughout the preparation for the competition, the Japanese and English teams never interacted much. Only after the competition did they start to get to know each other. They all had positive impressions and experiences with each other in the post-competition celebrations, but I did sense an undercurrent of unease on the issue of the results.

But perhaps I am being too harsh too. 6^th might be considered an underperformance by NUS’s past record, but that was also because its record had been almost unnaturally stellar. Many of the other competitors considered any form of placement in the competition a good result, and I learnt from Karen later that when the Meiji University Team’s coach burst in tears hearing that his team had gotten 7^th, they were tears of joy rather than sadness.

When valuing a particular experience, perhaps it is easy to just look at the top-line and bottom-line numbers: how much time, energy, money etc. did one invest? And what was the return on that investment? With a law school competition, it might be: how prestigious is the competition? And what is the result achieved?

All of the team members readily admitted that if this was a ‘normal’ competition in English, they would have to place well for the experience to be a success. Of course, they emphasised, a competition in Japanese was different. It was the first time they were doing it, and they were building the foundations to do better next year, they assured me. But it was also true that with the expectation that they had to do well taken away, the team had found the room to have fun, and live in the moment fully. They did the competition out of their love for the experience of competing, their love of improving their proficiency in the language, and even of learning a new area of the law.

I tried to probe a little further. After all, our conversation over the last few hours had gone well. And sitting in that U-Town Starbucks, it just felt like one of those afternoons where anything was possible, where a new, crazy, idea could just sprout forth.

Did they think this competition had changed their approach to life?

“100%” Phoebe responded without hesitation. “After the competition, I could feel there was a big change in me. The fact that we could do something crazy like this taught me that I don’t have to fear so much. I mean,” Phoebe paused. “I learnt Japanese without any connection to the country. I just did it because my sister wanted to learn it and I just tagged along for fun. So I was always afraid to speak the language to someone else because I thought ‘this isn’t my language’.”

“And I always assumed that yes, learning Japanese may be good for my CV down the line or something,” she continued, “but I had so many experiences, both positive and negative, because I had made this leap, and what I realised is that the point is to use what I am learning now, and to do the best I can now, imperfect as it is. So I have, for the first time, genuinely considered ways I can use Japanese in my future career, to explore getting a job in Japan and all that. Even if I stumble and fail, well that’s the point, isn’t it?”

For Kenshi, the experience seemed to be the impetus for him to pursue his Japanese language ability at an even higher level. He had witnessed in full force, the Japanese legal world, and he realised that he wanted to get to know more about it.

“I was thrown off the deep end,” Kenshi said, “but it also gives me more confidence in the future and more impetus to perfect the language.”

Phyllis had quite the adventure in her first semester of law school, with more ups and downs perhaps, than many might go throughout their entire university life. She hoped that the future would be just as exciting, although hopefully not quite so terrifying. Either way, it was an experience to remember.

As for Karen, before INC Sophia, she had gone through law school largely rudderless. Her grades were not the best, and they had begun to weigh on her.

The competition, however, had given her a new spring in her step.

“This competition really affirmed for me that I can still like the law even though my grades are bad.” Indeed, it was more than that, she had showed she was a fantastic organiser, an incredibly hard worker, a great memo writer, and she did something many of her more academically accomplished peers would hesitate to touch.

Prof Sam Tang concurred in written texts, “I have a newfound appreciation for the crazy things our students do—and you really don't have to be on the dean's list to do absolutely amazing things in law school.”

She also added, “It's always very funny to me how our students can simultaneously underestimate their own abilities ("Oh no, Prof we are going to fail our exams." Oh, please.) and overestimate them ("Prof, we totally know enough Japanese to tackle at 60+ page hypo, write our submissions and talk to Japanese people using legal Japanese despite not being very good at Japanese let alone kanji") at the same time.”

Karen fit the bill for Prof Sam’s description perfectly (I suspect it was directed at her). At the end of our interview, she proclaimed, “I know I have no right to say this, but I am honestly excited for Year 2 Sem 2.

She paused, “Although based off my grades I should be thinking about dropping out!”

Her teammates around her all collectively rolled their eyes.

Author's endnote: I would very much like to thank the NUS INC Sophia Japanese Team, as well as Profs Alan Koh and Sam Tang for being so forthcoming and open in sharing their experience, and especially to Karen for her help organising the article. All photos and videos (except otherwise stated) are credited to the team.

In 2023,  4 NUS Students decided to compete in a Japanese-language mooting and negotiation competition.

INC Sophia is a mooting and negotiation competition held annually at Sophia University in Tokyo, consisting of both English and Japanese Language components. It is typically contested by law schools in the Asia-Pacific region. While NUS Law typically only fields teams in the English component, last year,  4 students decided to take on the unique and somewhat insane challenge of competing in Japanese as well.

Their experience, I think, highlights the capacity of us as students to take on unique opportunities and excel in them, and perhaps makes us reconsider what success as a university student could look like. For that reason, their story is one worth telling here.

This story has been split into 2 parts for length. Read Part 2 here.

Part 1: ‘I thought she was a bald Chinese man who was into Japanese girls’

One of the great blessings of competing in INC Sophia for Kenshi Yanagisawa was that it reconnected him with his old secondary school friend, Motoki.

It was on an afternoon in September 2023, one of those that seemed to go on forever without any purpose or significance. Kenshi had been holed up deep within law school at one of the study rooms listening to an online lecture, when he suddenly received an Insta DM from Motoki, whom he had not talked to in years.

It read “Eh bro, would you be interested in joining the Japanese debate?”

That sounded interesting. At least more interesting than the lecture in front of him. Motoki had been classmates with Kenshi back when they were in Japanese language school together, before going on separate paths. Now Motoki was in Business school, and while they did not know it then, this conversation revitalised their friendship with each other.

At that time, however, Kenshi simply responded, “Is this something from your faculty or what?”

“No bro, it’s actually from YOUR faculty”, Motoki replied, before immediately sending him a 40-page Japanese problem.

Kenshi skimmed the top of the document. ‘Wasn’t this INC Sophia, but why is it in Japanese?’ he thought.

Kenshi had known INC Sophia to be something of a ‘starter-competition’. Typically reserved only for NUS first-year students, it pitted them against predominantly Japanese universities, with the odd-smattering of other teams from Australia and other Asian countries. It was organised annually by Sophia University in Tokyo in late November or December.  It was also a competition that NUS did very well in—in the 7 times that it competed, it placed every single time, won outright 3 times, scored 2nd place in 2, and had gotten 3rd in the latest edition, not to mention the numerous individual awards that had become commonplace for the NUS team.

While NUS Law students are, and are expected to be, a very talented bunch, its consistently strong showing might also be partially attributed to the fact that it only sent English-language teams and were going up predominantly against Japanese students competing in their second language.

2023 however, was going to be different.

有志募集中 [Recruiting Members]?

I had pitched the idea myself, in a mala-hotpot shop of all places, during a post-competition celebratory lunch for ICC Australia, a mediation competition. We had done much better than we expected, so it was one of those afternoons where everything felt possible.

“We have so many smart people in law school that can speak Japanese. Why not we send a Japanese-speaking team this year? I’m sure we would do well,” I said.

I had competed in INC Sophia several years ago, so it was close to my heart. I assumed—wrongly, as it turned out—that because NUS English teams could consistently do well, there would be no problem in Japanese too.

Chang Li-Ann, who was my teammate, looked at me funny. She had recently been newly appointed as Vice-President of the Collaborative Dispute Resolution Club (CDRC), the CCA which organised these sorts of competitions, and she cut a no-nonsense figure. Meticulous, studious, and by-the-book, she surprised me when she responded positively. She had someone in mind that might be interested, she told me.

That someone was Karen Lee, a Year 2 student. She and Li-Ann had been friends since primary school, but they were complete opposites in personality. Karen was spontaneous, exuberant, and full of chaotic energy. Her Telegram handle was ‘Zhou Yan’, her favourite Chinese rapper, and her only profile picture was of said rapper, providing no indication as to her actual identity.

“If Li-Ann and I had first met in law school we would not have been friends,” Karen told me.

When Li-Ann asked her if she would be interested in joining the Japanese-language INC Sophia— a big decision that she would hesitate to make, weighing the pros and cons of joining, the potential costs to one’s studies that might entail, etc—Karen agreed immediately.

Given Karen’s enthusiasm, Li-Ann tasked her with finding a team of at least four students with the requisite Japanese proficiency to sign up, and a coach who could guide them. Only if they could be persuaded to sign up, would the team be sent.

Karen got to work. She first rang up Phyllis Loh, who had mentioned that she was learning Japanese during Burton Ong’s contracts picnic a year ago. Karen had made a mental note of it back then, and now she hoped that she had found a kindred spirit.

For her part, Phyllis was raring to do something interesting in law school and the idea of competing in Japanese sounded like a good fit. She had taken a gap year in the previous year, partly to self-study Japanese, although that meant that she would be participating in a Japanese moot as a fresher in her first semester.

Karen knew this might be a potential concern, but she brushed those concerns aside. She was just glad that she could find someone to join her team. She planned to organise an audition afterward anyway, based on Japanese language ability, to sieve out participants.

Next, they had to find a coach. Karen had been a research assistant for Prof Samantha Tang. It happened that her husband, Prof Alan Koh (a Business Law professor at NTU) was something of a Japanese expert. Prof Alan did legal research in Japanese for a living and was largely professionally fluent in it. Both he and Prof Samantha often travelled to Japan to give lectures for Japanese universities, and he worked behind the scenes with NUS Law to develop academic exchanges with universities in Japan.

When Karen came to them to ask them to be their coach, they thought that it was a crazy idea—but just crazy enough to give it a try. In truth, Prof Alan was also simply looking for an excuse to travel to Japan with his wife in December, and this chance to reconnect with some of his Japanese academic counterparts was as good as any.

However, Karen started running into trouble finding people to sign up for her project. As the veritable Nick Fury of the competition, she was committed to making this competition happen. She called up friends, acquaintances, and soon, any student that was rumoured to understand any Japanese. She organised them into a Telegram group, and tried to convince them to sign up for the competition. Most, however, baulked at the commitment that was required, or simply were not confident in their Japanese language skills. This was especially after they had read through the 40-page Japanese document (the same one that Kenshi received), which was the question paper for the previous year’s INC Sophia. It contained many words in business Japanese and kanji which competitors were expected to be familiar enough with to moot and do a negotiation with. A common reason for not joining was that most were unsure if they could achieve a good result in the competition, to the extent it would be worth the potential impact the competition would have on their grades.

Thus, Karen began adjusting her pitch. She started downplaying the language requirement and the amount of time one would have to put into the competition, and started emphasising the fact that one would have the chance to go to Japan for holiday since the competition coincided with the winter break.

“I was very desperate, ok?” Karen related, “I really really wanted to go for this.”

However, her strategy did not really work because a) her spiel about the low commitment and low language requirements was a flat-out lie—which was easily seen through the 40-page INC Sophia Japanese document, and b) half of law school planned to go to Japan for holiday over winter break anyway.

Eventually, Karen expanded her search to outside of law school. That was how news of INC Sophia reached Business school through Motoki, and later to Kenshi.

Kenshi thought that the idea of competing in Japanese was a fun one, and he decided that he needed an opportunity to ‘take [his] mind off law school for a bit’, so he signed up.

He did not read the 40-page document that Karen had sent him.

Phoebe Tan also first heard about INC Sophia through a friend who baulked at the commitment level. But for Phoebe, she was in her fourth year of law school and wanted to participate in at least one competition before she graduated. When she received Karen’s contact details, she hesitated. Phoebe had no idea who Karen was, all she saw of the person she was supposed to contact was Karen’s tele-handle, which was, as earlier established, represented by a balding-middle-aged Chinese rapper called ‘Zhou Yan’.

“I thought [Karen] was a bald Chinese man who was into Japanese girls,” Phoebe said, “When I saw that tele handle I was like: ‘so….cute…err’.”

After she had ascertained that Karen was not in fact looking for a Japanese waifu, she agreed to sign up. Karen made pains to establish that they would not even have to meet up and prepare all that often, “maybe just once a week several times”. Phoebe, like Kenshi, did not read the 40-page Japanese document that was sent to her. She figured that there would be an audition to filter her out if her language ability was not up to par.

In fact, there turned out to be no audition, because Karen literally could not find anyone else. And thus, it was the four of them: Phoebe, a fourth-year; Kenshi, a third-year; Karen, a second-year; and Phyllis, in her first semester of law school; formed the Japanese INC Sophia team.

In or Out?

Phoebe’s first in-person meeting with her team left her more confused than ever. She had just come out of an exam and was slightly late, so the logical thing for Karen to do was to put a picture of Phoebe on the projector screen next to a photo of Kento Yamazaki. This was the first thing Phoebe saw when she walked in.

Also, Phoebe (still) had not realised Karen was a girl, and so her first words to her were, “Are you Phyllis?” They were then paired together for a mock negotiation round with a simple negotiation problem that Prof Alan provided, which did not go well, considering they had never done a negotiation problem before. Another warning sign came when, during the read-out of the 40-page INC Sophia Japanese problem to gauge their Japanese standards, Phyllis continually struggled to read some of the kanji characters.

But it was not all bad. Despite Phoebe’s initial apprehension, she found that she worked really well with Karen during the mock negotiation round. Phyllis, belying her inexperience, was extremely cool and collected, and crucially, they all vibed with each other.

Nevertheless, having just returned from an expensive exchange, Phoebe was unsure if she wanted to splash another wad of cash on a trip to Japan in December with a bunch of people she had just met. Given that INC Sophia was being held in a hybrid format, she and Phyllis decided that they were going to compete online from Singapore, while Kenshi and Karen would travel in person. Kenshi, also not being close to Karen, planned to fly back to Singapore immediately after the competition too.

Karen was unperturbed by all this. She was satisfied that the competition was happening after all, and so she made plans to hang out with a bunch of friends afterwards. She even managed to snag a free stay with them.

Prof Alan, however, was more concerned about this situation. Team coordination would be a big issue with the team thousands of kilometres apart. All the other teams were going to be there in person, including both NUS English teams. Additionally, despite the promises by Sophia University of hybrid facilities being available, he was not convinced they would work as planned.

“I have as much confidence in Japanese universities' hybrid facilities as Japan's ability to fix its birth rates,” he related.

More importantly, Prof Alan was worried that if the team did not commit to going in-person, the high commitment level required might sway several members of the team to quit the competition. He did not say so aloud, but quietly intimated his concerns to Karen.

To sweeten the deal, Prof Alan went so far as to offer to sponsor the entire trip for the team, which took them aback. They were really grateful but declined his offer. However, his efforts did eventually convince Phyllis and Phoebe to book tickets to Japan and compete in person, although they all still planned to holiday separately afterward.

Prof Alan had thrown himself into the competition with a great deal of vigour. He acted as the team’s coach, advisor, and emotional support animal. Being the best speaker of Japanese among them, he became the team’s go-to for any help they needed in Japanese, especially when it came to translating business Japanese terms and writing their memos.

“Honestly, it’s so funny,” Karen told me, “I was supposed to be doing work for Prof Alan [as a research assistant], but in the end he ended up doing work for me. You could not pay someone to give the help Prof Alan gave us during this competition.”

His wife, Prof Sam, was also extremely proactive in providing recommendations to the team on where to stay and where to go in Japan. She often organised the logistics of her and her husband’s couple trips to Japan and was keen to impart her knowledge on a bunch of clueless twenty-somethings.

While the team did not really start out as a cohesive unit, they steadily began to hang out with each other more. They agreed to meet on Wednesdays to discuss the problem question or to work on negotiation and mooting skills. The deliverables were very substantive—with both an arbitration moot and a negotiation problem—they had to produce a 12-page arbitration memo detailing their legal arguments, a 2-page counter-memo to rebut their opponents' points, a 12-page negotiation memo to set out their negotiation plan, a pre-negotiation presentation, present their actual oral arguments for the moot, and conduct a 3-hour business negotiation, all in Japanese. Significantly, the memos were to be due in late November, smack within the exam period.

But in late September, these were all still far-off deadlines. Mostly, the team spent their time bonding over-focusing on their other classes and their shared Japanese interests. They created a dedicated Discord channel to study together and started a competition for the most hours worked, one that Phoebe eventually won.

They also created an ‘Omakase Fund’, with monetary contributions for being late or accidentally speaking English. That, in actuality, was a ruse to buy a gift for Prof Alan and Prof Sam after the competition.

Reality only began to really strike towards the end of October. Finals had begun to loom over all of them, but that was also the time when the immense amount of work needed to be done for the memo dawned upon them. Their competition problem was a highly complicated one. It dealt with a commercial contract involving the launch of a satellite into space, and they had to make arguments on technical disputes within the contract. The disputes spanned across different legal topics, many of which the team had not learnt in school, and included a difficult question on conflict of laws. Doing these topics would have been difficult enough in English, and nigh impossible in Japanese.

One thing to understand is that the Japanese language is an immensely complicated beast in translation. It is not just that the sentence structures are completely different from English—Japanese is a very honorific language. It has very specific registers to be used in formal or legal settings that were largely unknown to the team. Kenshi, being the best at Japanese amongst them, was the team’s go-to for most translations, as he pored over dictionaries and Japanese legal documents to try and learn the words he needed to use.

“I used to be rather complacent in my Japanese knowledge,” he said, “but after this experience, I realised that I really still have a very long way to go.”

For context, Kenshi, and the entire team for that matter, had Japanese skills that were far above the conversational level. Kenshi had received a formal Japanese education for 9 years, up until the equivalent of a secondary school graduate in Japan, and was also taking a Level 4000 Japanese language module at NUS. The rest of the team had also studied Japanese for years. Still, it took them about 4-5 hours to translate each paragraph of their arbitration memo.

All this meant that sacrifices had to be made. First out of the window was negotiation training. Although the negotiation component was a full 50% of the competition score, it was simply a luxury the team could not afford. Next went most of their studying time for finals.

Karen in particular, worked on the competition at the expense of everything else, to the point where Li-Ann became very concerned for her. She knew that Karen had to improve her grades that semester and regretted even bringing up the idea of competing in INC Sophia to her.

But everything started falling apart.

Edging Disaster

First, Phylis experienced a rather major family emergency. For privacy reasons I cannot go into more detail here, but suffice to say, it was such that there was never a question for the rest of the team for Phyllis to have to take a step back from her INC Sophia commitments.

They knew how much harder the competition was on Phyllis as a Year 1, and the timing of this emergency had come right as the semester was kicking into high gear. With her having to deal with that, falling far behind her other academic commitments, and with her LARC viva, the following week, the rest of the team knew they needed to protect her physical and mental wellbeing. But that also meant a greater workload was shared among the three of them.

To make matters worse, INC Sophia organisers constantly made edits to the arbitration problem, at times completely changing the substantive dispute of the case. The team, who had started early to try and get a heads-up on the problem, were blindsided on multiple occasions.

It came to the point where, two weeks before her property finals, Karen had done little to no revision for the subject. Kenshi was working on translating their arbitration memo the day before his evidence exam. The initial idea of signing up for INC Sophia to ‘escape law school’ was like a bad joke—he was not studying for his law subjects, but was spending more time than ever within the premises of law school

Blessings in Disguise

Ironically, the amount of effort that INC Sophia took up actually improved the academic grades of the INC Sophia team. For Kenshi, he credited it to the fact that working on INC Sophia kept his legal mind running in the background.

“Let’s be honest,” he said, “If I had not been doing INC Sophia, most of the extra time I had would probably have been spent chilling on YouTube videos or something like that.” He ended up doing very well for his evidence exam and other subjects, despite all the drama.

For Karen, it was because INC Sophia allowed her to make friends with a whole bunch of seniors. As the team constantly studied together, Phoebe’s good friend, Kimmie Tan, often joined them. When she saw Karen’s property exam plight, she immediately offered her notes to her. These notes turned out to be a lifeline.

“It was the best [set of] notes I had ever seen,” Karen explained, “and it was not on the muggers website.” She ended up studying for her Property Law exam over two days using that set of notes, and “got the second-best result I ever got for a core law subject”.

Beyond academic grades, INC Sophia ended up forging very strong bonds between all of the team members. It was trauma bonding at its finest.

Karen recalled that there was an instance when she and Phoebe travelled to school together at 11:30 p.m. for an all-nighter.

“We were finishing each other’s sentences throughout the cab ride,” Karen recalled. “That was when we realised just how much we get each other.”

These experiences, despite the stress and uncertainty, were the sort that could define one’s university life, and forge one’s identity. The INC Sophia Japanese team thus decided that they could stand each other after all and made the collective decision to travel together after the competition. Karen had to give up her free accommodation with her friends, and Kenshi decided to extend his trip. Phyllis, having overcome a very eventful first semester, was ready to put it all behind her. And Phoebe, despite her initial apprehension about joining, related that this competition was ‘the second-best decision I made in law school—after exchange of course’.

However, before their inevitable holiday together, they still had to get through the actual competition first. That was going to be, in their own words, ‘[a moderately] expensive, fun blaze of glory’.

Part 2.

A collaboration piece by Nadine Lee, Danyelle Lee, and Ng Jun-Kai

Nadine: This article is not sponsored by Cates. In my capacity as Chief Editor, though, I will say that Justified is open to getting sponsored. The simple answer to why Cates should sponsor us is that we had three writers review their delivery service, in a landmark Justified article – the very first collaborative article... (But please note that all of our begging for Cates to sponsor us is merely in jest.)

Danyelle: Cates please sponsor. I have been using your app for a year and I am in love thanks.

Jun-Kai: If you’re feeling bougie but not quite bougie enough for GrabFood, Cates is the right option for you. But, I am never too bougie to turn down a sponsor <3

Nadine: So apparently the lockers next to Octobox are not lockers, but instead food lockers. I'm constantly thinking of what to eat during lectures and tutorials, but using the usual food delivery channels is costly (and will probably end up with me eating McDonalds' again), so when I found out what Cates was doing, I was intrigued.

In a nutshell, what Cates does is bring food from Kent Ridge to BTC, with no delivery fee. You order your food before the cut-off time, and then during the delivery window, Cates will leave your food at the white lockers beside Octobox. I was going to try this out, but I knew I couldn't do it alone: I needed the expertise of a Cates veteran (Danyelle), and a fellow noob (Jun-Kai). I sent a message to the Justified group chat asking if anyone would be interested in reviewing Cates with me, and they responded with both speed and excitement. It was time to begin.

This. (Photo credit to Nadine Lee)

Danyelle: As a long-time supporter of Cates, I could not resist promoting the app that gave me access to the best food in school. Surprise, surprise, the food in Summit is not my favourite, nor the best. See fish soup article.

Nadine: The thing is, I can't give a review until I've tried it myself. So off I went to try Cates. I like the concept, so I'm hoping the process of delivering food from Kent Ridge works smoothly. Here are some things I've heard about Cates: The food usually comes at the end of the delivery window – that is, if you order your food to arrive within 12-1pm, it's more likely to arrive closer to 1pm. Second, don't order food that gets soggy, since the food needs to make the journey from Kent Ridge to BTC.

Downloaded the app… (Photo credit to Nadine Lee)

Selected my school, immensely hurt that Cates has side chicks (Photo credit to Nadine Lee)

Jun-Kai: Be not deceived as I was in selecting the “Bukit Timah” option: it is but a barren land empty of any food options.

Picked something at random to see how the interface was like (I was testing this at night switching between my phone and doing my Equity tutorial) (Photo credit to Nadine Lee)

Honestly, this concept is similar to WhyQ, which I (ab)used all the time when I lived on campus because delivery was free and there was no minimum order. Sadly those days of staggering down to the pickup point to grab my $4 rice are over.

With that, time for Phase 2: Ordering something from Cates when I'm actually in school. I'll report back then.

The Food Is Here

Nadine: I started writing this article on Tuesday night, but didn't have the time to get my locker-delivered food on Wednesday. It is now Thursday, and I am intending to have a meal after my Equity tutorial. It is the same Equity tutorial I was doing work for when I started this article. I am such a good student.

I placed my order the night before, deciding to order Salted Egg Chicken Cutlet Rice from Taiwan Ichiban at the Science canteen. Call it reminiscing, but when I lived in UTown, I ate Taiwan Ichiban so often for lunch that it probably did something bad to my body. There is something very satisfying about a chicken cutlet, rice with sauce, and an egg. I finished up class at 11:45 and waited for my food, which was slated to arrive at 1pm.

And then something got in the way – I got sucked into the endless vortex that was the Law Careers Fair. I didn't actually think I was going to bother with visiting all three locations that the firms had set up their booths, but before I had even left my second location, I checked my phone and realized that it was 1:46pm. My food had been sitting in its little box for an hour, perhaps even longer.

Photo credit: Nadine Lee

After bashing the locker in a bid to figure out how to open it with my fists, I realized that the app had been begging me to press a button on the app that would unlock the locker. Very interesting, very brilliant, and much more techy than I expected. The collection experience was good. I made guilty eye contact with my food, knowing that I had left him unattended and lonely in his locker for over an hour while I had been talking to lawyers and receiving more law firm freebies than I could carry.

Unfortunately, it was about to get… more unfortunate. See, I'd only been alerted to the time because I had a meeting at 2pm. It was now 1.50pm, and I had no time to eat. I shot an email off to the people I was supposed to meet, letting them know that I had gotten carried away with my food in one hand and Google Maps in the other. I spent the next 20 minutes sweatily trying to find my way into the Federal Building. While I'm here, I'd just like to say that walking to the glass door of the Federal Building, only to be told to go all the way around to the Oei Tiong Ham Building… Neither me nor my food were very happy about that.

My food and I trying to find the meeting room together (Photo credit: Nadine Lee)

As I left my meeting, I wondered if I should go to the Moot Court to finish off my Careers Fair walk, or if I should just go and eat. That decision was made for me when a fellow Justified editor messaged me: "I'm coming to you." They had listened to my very bad advice to travel from Kent Ridge to BTC for the Careers Fair, and so my food spent another half-hour or so uneaten as I went to tour more firm booths.

I think I only started eating at 3:30pm, almost three hours after my food first arrived.

The packaging was fantastic – there was no spillage (which is good, because I didn't order anything that could be spilled in the first place, so that would have been weird), and sturdy utensils came packaged in their own little paper sleeves. The spicy powder Taiwan Ichiban is known for came in a cute little sachet. All around, the presentation was 10/10, and I was amazed that there was some residual heat.

Now, I've ordered Taiwan Ichiban before, and watched the staff fry up a hot batch of chicken before pairing it with steaming rice. The rice in front of me now had clumped up, and the chicken was chewy. I'm not blaming Cates or Taiwan Ichiban though, because yeah, it was me who left the food unattended for over three hours. Overall, it still managed to be a satisfying meal. Satisfying enough that I staggered to the Justified club room and took a food-coma nap afterwards.

In my meeting, I happened to mention Cates, and one of the people I was meeting with mentioned that they had ordered the Yong Tau Foo from Cates, and it was excellent. That's another option, if you're looking for ideas on what to order. I passionately, intensely recommend Taiwan Ichiban, especially if you ever find yourself on campus. I suppose it just wasn't meant to be on this day.

Delivery experience: 10/10

Packaging: 10/10

Food: My fault/10

Jun-Kai: A first-time experience calls for a special occasion; call me corny. So, what better occasion than to start Week 4 off with Cates delivering my first meal of the week!

Originally, I did not have classes at Bukit Timah this blessed Monday--my Contracts lecture had been shifted online, as had my LARC class. However, when my LARC tutor mentioned that he would host the online lesson from BTC anyway, I took that as an excuse (or a sign, rather) to come to BTC to experience Cates. Sure, I could have just ordered my food to be delivered to my Residential College (Cates has that option, indeed), but would that review be authentic and useful to a BTC foodie? Disputable.

I had my reservations about Cates--I’d heard that, by the time the food arrived, it would have already been something around an hour out of the kitchen, and I was concerned about the food quality. Hoping to give the app the best chance of success, I went with something I felt was safe: a spicy chicken alfredo from Pasta Express.

Having logged my order the night before, I left my fate to be sated to the higher powers at Cates. Throughout the duration of the LARC class, I split my attention between case theory and my growing hunger, which was a product both of being in my 14th hour of intermittent fasting, and my anxiety that the food would arrive late or in disappointing fashion. The doubt intensified as the clock struck 1pm (the tail end of the lunchtime delivery window) with no notification of the food’s arrival.

Happily, the moment I reached the Summit, I was greeted by the notification that, indeed, my food had arrived! I searched for my food and, like Nadine, was not aware that the lockers outside Octobox were for Cates; honestly I never questioned who would need storage space in such an odd and public part of the campus. I spent a good minute wondering why the food had not been set on one of the umbrella’d tables outside Octobox, before the locker thing clicked for me.

Locker post-looting

My pasta loot looked fine. For $6.20 (including delivery fee), it was a respectable portion of creamy spaghetti, chicken, garlic, and spinach. The packaging also looked presentable, and it hadn’t lost much heat in transit.

Chicken alfredo

With an iced coffee as accompaniment, I chowed down. It was everything you could ask for from a portion of chicken alfredo--rich, garlicky, and spicy as I had requested it. Was it the best pasta I’ve ever tasted? Probably not, but I’m no pasta connoisseur. I have to remark, its affordability was a major driver in making the food so satisfying; a lunch for under $10 in this economy? In this part of town?? A marvel.

Also, I’m still quite full, a surprise given that I’m writing this about 3 hours after my chow. I’m not experiencing the food coma nor the rapid onset of hunger I do with most other pastas, so thank you, Pasta Express.

All in all, my first time trying Cates was pleasant; all my worries about the quality of delivery are put to rest. Maybe I’m setting myself up for disappointment the next time I order with Cates, but I choose to remain optimistic until proven otherwise.

Delivery experience: 9/10

Packaging: 10/10

Food: 7/10

As an addendum: One thing I liked about the Cates app was that, when I decided to cancel my original order because I wanted to get my food delivered to BTC instead of UTown like I had originally planned, I was instantly rebated with in-app credits which I could use to make a new order. Your mileage may vary, but I found this quite useful and intuitive in the context of correcting a mistaken order, rather than waiting for money to be credited to your bank account.

Danyelle:

As a lover of Cates, I have ordered from them since the start of Year 2 Sem 1 (a year and a half ago) and thought that everyone knew of their existence and was fortunate enough to be blessed with food from Kent Ridge everyday. Little did I know that hardly anyone knew about Cates. So when the opportunity presented itself to write about the app that saved me from the monotony of BTC food everyday, I jumped at it.

Last Thursday, I again ordered Cates and here is my go-to order along with everything you need to know about the ordering process.

Speaking from experience, it is best to place an order for lunch the night before. Does it take a lot of effort? Maybe. But consider this: would you rather have to eat Summit food again? Would you rather go through the torture of running to queue for food after your prof ends tutorial late? I would not.

When ordering, remember to take note of the cut-off time, or you may not be able to eat what you want or are craving for lunch. Also, be warned that though the delivery time states 1200-1300 for its delivery time, the actual ETA is more like 1300.

On Thursday afternoon, I waited excitedly for my lunch. There is nothing like Pasta Express’s Spicy Carbonara to make my day after 3 hours of class. My class ended at 12, so I sadly had to wait for an excruciating hour before my food came.

Protip: If you are hungry and desperate enough, you can wait at the lockers around 1pm. The uncle who comes to deliver the food may pity you enough to ask for your order and pass it to you without you having to collect it from the locker. The uncle is super nice and kind and will help you for as long as he is there for. Sadly, I did not take a picture with him and even if I did, PDPA is a thing. But you will recognise him when you see him!

I know some of you will be thinking “is the food still good after an hour of waiting to be delivered?” Absolutely, yes. As a connoisseur of Pasta Express, I will be bold enough to claim that it tastes just as good, if not better, when eaten at BTC. The pasta was still warm… enough. My picture does not do Pasta Express enough justice because it looks dry and cold. But be not deceived. The cream sauce is all at the bottom so mix it well. The sous vide egg was also perfectly done with its creamy golden yolk oozing.

The portion size is substantial and filling. For people who like me, wondering whether to get their pasta with spice or not, I would say “go for it!” My spice tolerance is truly terrible but the chilli added is not unmanageable and gives the pasta a good kick that really adds to the overall flavour. I cannot speak for what the taste would be like if you get a tomato-based pasta but chilli paired with a cream-based pasta is simply heavenly.

I will now attempt to rein in my ardent love for Pasta Express and move on to review some of the other types of food I’ve tried through Cates:

A snippet of my order history from Cates

Let me preface the following retrospective food reviews by saying this: If I don’t remember whether the food was good or not, it was probably average and worth trying if you’re feeling a little adventurous and horribly bored of Summit food. If I remember the food, it was either really good or really bad. But then again, these are my personal opinions and I have been told by my friends that I can be overly critical about food. I’m referring to my review of the fish soup stall which I would certainly rewrite if I could go back in time.

Asia Wok: Cates tells me that I ordered Salted Egg Chicken Rice. However, I am currently trawling through my terrible memory of the food I consumed almost an entire year ago but nothing significant is coming up. My memory seems to have grouped all the rice dishes I have ordered from Cates and concluded that they were all unimpressive. The only thing I remember is that the rice was dry. The chicken was probably average though and from my memory, was a little bit lukewarm. Not my thing but if you’re okay with that and are willing to experiment and try it, I would totally respect that too since BTC food sometimes drives us to try desperate alternatives.

Wu Yang Ma La Pot: Cates tells me that I ordered Pot Pork Noodles (funny description of Mala but we don’t judge here). Very frankly, I don’t remember that that was what I ordered but I do remember that it was pretty good. If you have been around long enough to remember when BTC had our own mala stall (Rest in Peace BTC Mala), I will attempt to compare them. If the BTC Mala was an 8/10 (personal opinion), this Mala is a 7/10. I give them the benefit of the doubt that the mala would have tasted better if it had been warmer and eaten on the spot. Still, if you are like me and often crave mala and sorely miss the BTC Mala stall (RIP), this is a pretty decent alternative!

Malapot: Logically, the malas have to be compared with one another and this one pales in comparison by a long shot. My unsolicited advice: don’t order this. The options for this stall are limited since there are only 2 options: chicken mala or seafood mala. I have only ever tried the chicken mala but I cannot imagine that the seafood would be worlds better. When the food came, the noodles were cold and dry and tasted a little bit funky (can’t put my finger on what it was). The chicken was also dry and tough. However, my biggest gripe as a self-proclaimed vegetable hater is that there were too many beansprouts. I don’t even hate bean sprouts that much, believe me, but when I paid $5.70 for mala, I didn’t expect half the meal to be bean sprouts. I mean if you love beansprouts, by all means order this mala but it was not for me.

Delivery experience: 10/10

Packaging: 8/10 [sometimes the cutlery is not delivered when requested and I got 2 spoons to eat pasta once 🙁]

Food: depends on which stall you order from but on average 8/10

The three of us hope that this article gives you some insight on what it's like to use Cates. It's simple to use, and Danyelle evidently has used Cates enough times to know all the tips and tricks, like waiting for the delivery uncle so he can give you the food straight away.

Cates, please sponsor us.

To start off, think about how often you say or hear the following:

1. "If I don't drink coffee I'll dissolve in these hallways…"
2. "The stress bro…"
3. "We're in hell…"

Next, open up Telegram and scroll through the last few announcements from the various groups in law school hosting events. How many of them preface their announcement with some variation of…

1. "We know law school is hard…"
2. "To ward off the stress in law school…"
3. "This place is a gaol but our event will help you cope…"

Finally, consider the premise of speaking something into existence. And therein lies something I think we should be discussing: Are we artificially ballooning the amount of academic stress we face by repeating the adage that law school is hard?

Why do we say that law school is hard and stressful?

Where there is smoke, there is fire, and this is no exception – most people who aren't mind freaks will agree that this is a challenging course to undertake. Law school is an intense place to be, and if we don't admit that, that's just living in denial. It helps to commiserate, too, because tough times are better off spent together.

But walking around a freshman orientation event in July, I was shocked to observe how many freshmen seemed to have already gotten their affairs in order – told the family they wouldn't see them for many moons because of all the studying they'd have to do, how the professors wouldn't be satisfied until they saw them personally grilled on a stick over a bonfire, kissed the family pet on its head and headed off to war. Despondently, many of them told me they were 'enjoying the last days of freedom' before 'hell' started, something I heard their OGLs and other seniors repeat to them.

Hell (pun intended), I think I may have said something to that effect too, for a lack of better conversation material. It's just one of those sayings. Like when you tell a groom to enjoy his bachelor party before the old ball and chain comes knocking; But just like that saying, maybe this belongs in the past.

Setting expectations is one thing. Terrifying freshmen and inundating them with scary stories is another.

And I posit that it may be a matter of pride, too. The 'law school is so hard' adage is repeated so many times that sometimes you wonder if the people saying it want to be true. Of course, not everybody chose to be here, whether it be because of overbearing parents who couldn't envision them being anything but a lawyer, doctor, or both.

And of course, it could just be said by people who are burnt out and have too much skin in the game to leave now. So saying that law school is hard, or hearing it, it becomes sort of… a badge of honour. Because you're still here. You're still surviving. Maybe not thriving, but Cs get LLBs, and all that.

No one knows what goes on in the hallowed halls of BTC, mostly because the other faculties can't find their way here (and don't really want to walk up a really shady flight of stairs that feel like they should lead to a… lair, for the lack of a better word). But only your student card unlocks the Law student lounge, and only you take exams that double as speed-typing tests! Surely that counts for something. It's an 'elite' course, and the suffering is commensurately 'top-tier'.  

So maybe that's why we say it so much among ourselves, why we joke that we need divine intervention if we want to get (insert whatever coveted law school result here), why Gideon (who is Gideon, by the way?) will never go out of business selling coffee. We're still here, and we're trying to maintain or invoke some modicum of pride. If not pride, then we're trying to cope, at least. Soothe our tired souls a little longer.

And some will argue that repeating this mantra – that law is hell – is preparing us for the legal profession. After all, many a lawyer has laughed and warned law students of 16 hour-workdays and clients calling them at 3AM, about how they're now alcoholics or addicted to caffeine. But even if that's true (and the author, for all our sakes, prays that it is not), it's not happening now. This 'preparation' sounds less like actual productive prep and more like an excuse to continue miserable banter that goes nowhere.

What's at stake, then?

So, should we still go around saying the following and its variations?

"Yo guys, let's go out and get a drink. We need to get wasted before finals season starts and we're sucked backwards and upside down into hell!"

"Hey Lawsku! Want to get your mind off being in hell and living a horrible existence with no end in sight for a few minutes? Come down to the Botanic Gardens pond. Right now we're taking turns to pour one cup into the pond to restore it to its original volume."

I personally think it's counterproductive, and I know what I said earlier: commiserating together can make things easier. But there's a breakpoint where enough is enough, and excess commiserating is just creating artificial misery that wouldn't exist if it were not spoken into existence.

That's right, I'm talking about manifestation – the act of thinking, speaking, or vibing something into existence. The mere utterance of the words 'Law school is so stressful, isn't it?', at some point, stops being useful and starts just being another stone piled on your shoulders. I don't care if you don't believe in manifestation. I listened to 583Hz Subliminal Manifest Good Grades and I passed H1 Chinese. Manifestation works. In this case, however, it's not manifesting a desirable result.

And if you don't buy the manifestation route, consider the scientific word for manifestation: Cognitive restructuring.

What is cognitive restructuring?

Essentially, cognitive restructuring is a psychological theory practised by cognitive behavioural therapists. It exists to correct maladaptive patterns of thinking. In the given example, the subject has a codependent relationship with his boss, and his boss verbally abusing him makes him believe he is worthless, leading to depression. Ideally, when we cognitively restructure the subject, when he is verbally abused, he reroutes his brain maps, and realizes that he is not fundamentally worthless – his boss was simply having a bad day. Now that he knows that he is not a broken man, our subject is no longer depressed.

Putting aside the horrifying implications of the employer-employee relationship in the above diagram, let us apply cognitive restructuring to talking about law school.

Conclusion: Law School Isn't That Hard

Just kidding. It is, and there are times where it feels so difficult it's, in a word, awful. But repeating that it is, everywhere, to everyone, can make you feel boxed-in. It may even make you feel that you need to tolerate unbearable conditions, even when you can no longer withstand it.

Really, it's not worth it. I'm guilty of this type of talk as well, and in my opinion, it's time to switch it up, for my own and everyone else's sakes, lest I drag them down with me. Let's start reducing these undesirable manifestations. Let's cognitively restructure ourselves, instead.

On a serious note – This article is not a substitute for mental health advice or treatment. Please seek help if you need it. Justified cannot guarantee that the world is a good place, but it's infinitely better off with you in it.

We are gathered here today to answer a question that has crossed the minds of every NUS Law student who has walked through the Botanic Gardens this semester on their way to class: What is going on with the lake?

Lake? What lake?

Year 1s: Believe it or not, the algae-infested puddle that you pass by every day from Botanic Gardens MRT station to Bukit Timah Campus (BTC) was once a lake, an ecosystem teeming with biodiversity.

Located near the Botanic Gardens’ Bukit Timah Entrance, the lake is known officially as the Eco-Lake (Author’s note: I didn’t know the lake had an official name until I started researching for this article). For most, the lake’s main claim to fame is its family of black swans, who can occasionally be spotted waddling along its shores and generally basking in the attention of excited tourists, expats and law students. Besides the swans, the lake is also home to other important plant and animal species.

Overall, it is a pretty idyllic picnic spot, described by the Singapore Botanic Gardens website in the following terms: ‘peaceful’, ‘a beautiful setting coupled with a soft and natural atmosphere’ and ‘an ideal place to wind down after a long day.’

Or at least it used to be. Since mid-August, I have noticed with mounting apprehension that the only thing that can be spotted ‘winding down’ around the Eco Lake is its water level, which has receded further and further inland to reveal mud and dry grass. Parts of the dried-up lakebed appear to have been recolonised by grass, almost threatening to transform the lake into a new football pitch. The changes have left the wooden benches which surround the lake’s original perimeter in a somewhat awkward position.

What remains of the water body is covered in an unattractive algal bloom. When I walked closer towards it last Thursday to get a better photo of the lake’s current state, I noticed a bewildered dragonfly repeatedly circling a patch of grass which used to be part of the lake, almost as if it shared my confusion (ok fine, maybe I’m just projecting).

What happened here?

Initial theories

Theory #1: Unfortunate casualty of anthropomorphic climate change

My first reaction was to blame climate change. From my experience, this is usually a satisfactory explanation for most, if not all, undesirable natural phenomena arising in the past century.

Crackpot rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Theory #2: Reclamation for alternative purposes (???)

However, the lake’s rapid decline and the eerie absence of life in the receded portions (minus my poor dragonfly friend) made me wonder if human activity could have played a more direct role in the lake’s draining.

In other words, could the drying of the Eco Lake reflect an intentional decision on the part of NParks to reclaim and use the space for other purposes?

Crackpot rating: ★★★★☆

The answer

I decided to write to NParks in search of answers.

About a week later, I received a response from Singapore Botanic Gardens Visitor Services.

Theory #2 was swiftly debunked :(. In short, NParks is aware of the low lake levels and is continuing to monitor the situation.

According to NParks, the water level at the Eco-Lake is known to fluctuate with weather conditions. In this case, it has temporarily receded due to the recent dry weather. This is not a cause for alarm as the lake is filled by rainwater from the surrounding catchment and generally refills quickly after heavy downpours.

In fact, this is not the first time that this has happened to the Eco Lake. A Mothership article from August 2019 featured a similar incident, blaming a dry spell with below average rainfall and maximum daily temperatures ranging between 31.9°C and 34.5°C for the shrunken lake.

Basically, this suggests that the lake’s current condition is not permanent and the Eco-Lake will (hopefully) bounce back once the dry spell abates.

Of course, this also raises more questions. As my seminar classmate pointed out when I related this explanation to him: "But it rained last night. How come this morning, the lake was even drier?"

It is true that the continuing decline of the lake despite the occasional thunderstorm here and there does seem like there may be renewed cause for concern. Indeed, according to Metereological Service Singapore's fortnightly forecast and review, most parts of Singapore recorded above average rainfall in September 2023. Wouldn't this have been sufficient to end the dry spell?

However, closer scrutiny of the rainfall anomaly map also shows that rainfall distribution was uneven across Singapore.

Moreover, the weather forecast for the first two weeks of October suggests that the showers are expected to be mostly of a short duration. Therefore even though there has been some rainfall, perhaps this has not been of a sufficient volume to raise the water level of the lake.

Another question: What happened to the wildlife that used to live in the parts of the lakebed that have dried up? Could the fishes, sensing the danger, have migrated to other lakes? Is the Eco-Lake connected to other bodies of water such as the Botanic Gardens Swan Lake?

I don't really have an answer for that. However, based on publicly available map data from Google Maps, it seems that the Eco-Lake is not connected to other lakes in the Botanic Gardens.

What can we do?

NParks also informed me in their email that to preserve the habitat of the lake, it urges the public to stick to the natural boundaries of the lake and not to wander into the dried areas of the Eco-Lake during this period.

If you see visitors to the Botanic Gardens ‘exploring’ the new banks of the Eco-Lake out of curiosity, you can explain the situation to them and politely request for them to refrain from doing so, lest their intrepid investigations lead to more lasting damage of the lakebed. This could potentially impede the lake's recovery, even in a future abundance of rainfall.

Final thoughts and musings

I’ve been walking through the Botanic Gardens to get to school for two and a half years. But until it disappeared this summer, I never realised how much of a role the Eco-Lake played in lifting my spirits on the otherwise mundane walk to school (even on the days when there were no swans or otters present).

When you’re racing to get to class and make the 11-minute walk in five, it’s easier to gloss over the green. To move on autopilot, even if that means sacrificing the journey for the destination (and when that destination is the LT, it is this author’s opinion that the sacrifice is simply not worth it).

Amid the hustle and bustle of law school, let’s not forget - once in a while - to stop and smell the flowers.

At time of writing, it's Recess Week of Y2S1. I count the weeks off like a prisoner scratching lines into the wall of her cell. I should be preparing for my Property midterm, but I see things in the longterm (haha), so I am thinking of what non-law mods I will take in Y3.

Just 46 weeks until I get to participate in ModReg, the institution that my friends from other faculties have been agonizing over for the past three years. Oh, how I yearn to say the following phrases, and oh, how I practice them in the mirror so that when the time comes, I will be ready to say:

1. "Oh no, I missed Round 0!"
2. "Why are all of my tutorials at 7am?"
3. "Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of school and he's doing fine right...? Haha... Ha..."
   

Saltwater

For the uninitiated, Law students take core mods in their first two years, and can only begin to bid for modules they're interested in from Year Three onwards. They can be related to law, or they can not be. In the interest of their own sanity, many people opt to take at least one non-law related module, sometimes affectionately called Kent Ridge Mods for the reprieve they offer from the adorably compact Bukit Timah Campus.

I scoured NUSMods and interviewed some of my senior friends for this article, to get a sense of what mods would be good to take in Y3. Additionally, I got the opinions of friends from other faculties for opinions on some of the Kent Ridge Mods mentioned, and on ModReg in general – because maybe I'm suffering from grass-is-greener syndrome.

After all, for two years now, I've enjoyed having my modules and tutorials allocated to me, both a blessing and a curse – I can't get more desirable timeslots for my tutorials, but I don't have to think about registering for modules at all. Of course, the purpose of having core mods allocated to me is to instill basic principles of law into me before I'm allowed to ruin anyone's life with legal advice when I go out to practice. Plus, taking the exact same modules at the exact time as my batchmates gives a sense of camaraderie, like when someone says that their brain has shrunken into a little walnut because of Company and someone else agrees.

Chinese Medicine

The first person I spoke with was YH, who mentioned: "There's this very 'meme' mod called 'Chinese Medicine: Theory and Practice' (GEC1044/GEH1070). At the end of the mod, they ask you to write an essay, and you get to write anything you'd like about your qi or your yang or yin."

Here's a description of it from NUSMods:

"The second half allows students to study the theoretical foundation and practical aspects of Chinese medicine, which is opened to influence from western medicine and impact from modernity. Students will examine the globalisation of Chinese medicine, focusing on transregional connections and cultural negotiations with the world."

Not sure what you made of that, but 'practical aspects' sounds like they're going to let me do that really horrifying-looking heat cupping on someone. I'm kidding, of course, but if they're willing to give me some creative liberties – I have a few people in mind I wouldn't mind cupping. (Yes, I'm Chinese, yes, my family members do cupping, no, I'm never doing it just because of how it looks, sorry.)

Many of the Chinese-related modules are conducted in Chinese, obviously, and as a self-described banana, I'm a little intimidated. But some other mods clarify that they're conducted in English – CH3294, Science and Medicine in China (in English), states in the name of the mod that it's conducted in English. Bananas, you can cautiously approach now.

All in all, Chinese Medicine seems like a pretty interesting mod for those who'd like to expand their knowledge of medication beyond paracetamol.

Interlude – Auditing Mods

A little-known fact (or perhaps it's simply a little-exercised option amongst law students) is that you can audit mods – that is, just sit in on the lectures or seminars, with no need to do any homework or to do the exam. You just… sit there.

All you have to do is to get into contact with the professor teaching the class and ask for permission. Most professors will range from neutral to exhilarated that you want to sit in on their class.

You can look at the perks of auditing a mod in one of two ways: Either you're making the most of your university fees by taking as many classes as possible, or you're learning as much as possible for the love of education. Whichever you prefer, auditing a mod seems to be good fun. A friend of the author's fully audited a mod, but that story will be left for them to tell.

In my first run of Y2 (sorry folks, you're going to have to remember that I took an LOA for the rest of my tenure here), I audited CL2103 – Chinese Grammar. I sat in on a few lectures, before realizing that my banana brain could not handle the intricacies of Chinese grammar, especially because I failed to realize it was being taught in Chinese. I'll conquer this mod one day. But not as a graded mod. Definitely not as a graded mod, lest I assist in boosting the lowest end of the bell curve.

More Language Mods

Language mods are immensely popular among the NUS populace in general, let alone law students. If I had to hazard a guess why, it's a form of escapism. Why harbour horrible English thoughts when you could be speaking Français? I managed to back this up with l'évidence – when asked which of her non-law mods she enjoyed, N shared: "Definitely language mods – I love my Spanish class (LAS1201 Spanish 1) and my prof."

Indeed, language mods and their profs are known for being particularly nice and patient – they're excited that you're presumably interested in their language and culture. However, it's an open secret that students will sometimes feign incompetence re: the language in question in order to be sorted into a lower-level class.

The author is personally unsure about other language mods, but knows that this is particularly prevalent among East Asian language mods like Korean and Japanese. Many a weeaboo has been caught knowing a little too much in Japanese 1. My friends from other faculties who've taken language mods have this advice for you (though I was going to give this advice anyway): Do not pretend to be bad at the language.

Not only will the professors sniff it out (they do this every year; you're not coming up with a new tactic to slide under their noses), but the consequences are severe, and like… c'mon. Just be a decent person.

Another mod N recommended was Design Thinking (DTK1234). My CHS (College of Humanities and Sciences) shuddered when they heard DTK1234. I've seen the practical work required for DTK1234, so I'm not sure if I can recommend this. I remember being in Y1, hanging out in my friend's dorm as she was working on her 'prototype' for DTK1234. But I'm just really bad at anything to do with my hands, so if you're good with your hands, you might want to look into DTK1234.

Finally, N said: "I’m taking the Art of Imaginative Sketching (ID2117) right now – it's just weekly drawing assignments and it's amazing."

Apparently, this mod teaches 'left hand sketch'. I don't know if it means you'll be taught to draw your left hand, or draw with your left hand. A cursory Google search suggests it's the former, which disappoints me greatly.

More Things The Author Thought Would Be Cool

GET1020 – Darwin and Evolution: This mod is one of the most popular mods in NUS, hands down, both because the professor is a cool dude, and because it's apparently got a ludicrously light workload. Plus, apparently you get to watch movies in class.

GESS1037 – Gender and Sexuality: A Singaporean History: This mod sounds interesting. I don't have any more comments.

CS1010: Haha. Just kidding. I'd rather run into a wall.

Ready, Set…

I'm going back to studying for my midterm now, but writing this article gave me some hope that I'll make it to Year Three. Please, God, let me make it to Year Three.

This is an account of the author’s (real) experiences at the Stetson International Environmental Moot Court International Finals from 11 to 17 April 2023, as told through a series of fictitious diary entries.

Day 1

Wednesday, 12 April, 1.34 pm, Airspace, Somewhere Over the Atlantic

If Week 13 is Hell Week, then my hell is a Eurowings flight bound for Tampa, Florida.

The fluffy grey blanket (which I was so grateful for when we first boarded) has sadly revealed its true, treacherous nature as a health hazard – the light polyester fibres have liberated themselves into airborne fuzz, eventually settling on my clothes, hair, and eyes. It is a full flight; the cabin is packed with German tourists and noisy kinder, who climb on their seats and occasionally, topple the contents of their meal trays on the floor. There is inflight entertainment, but earpieces cost €2 a pop.

Not that we have the time to watch movies. Behind me, my teammate, Yan Ren, is working on his case for the Stetson International Environmental Moot Court which awaits us in Florida. Next to me, our other teammate, Tong Xin, is trying to churn out her Jurisprudence research paper, due one day after we get back to Singapore. Me? I’m reading Asher’s Consti muggers.

When I signed up to audition for the Stetson moot back in September 2022, I didn’t think I would make the team. I didn’t think we would make it to the international stage of the competition, and I certainly didn’t think we would be flying across the Atlantic Ocean two weeks before Finals.

And yet, here we are. It’s funny how life surprises you, though I’m not so sure I’ll be laughing in 14 days’ time.

We checked in at Changi Airport at 8 pm last night for the first leg of our flight from Singapore to Frankfurt, transited at cold, grey Frankfurt Airport for 5 hours (in clothing that was entirely unsuited to the 7°C weather). Then, we boarded this flight at 11.30 am with all the German tourists. In all, we have been travelling for 20 hours so far. In ‘real’ time, however, only 12 hours have passed (timezones suck). I feel sleepy and grimy, which makes sense because my last shower was more than a day ago, even if the clock says otherwise.

A child screams, two rows in front of me.

I can’t wait for this flight to be over.

(Still) Wednesday, 12 April, 9.51 pm, Airbnb

Writing this in bed with heavy eyelids.

We landed at around 4 pm, local time; I texted Prof Burton (who had arrived in Tampa before us) to let him know.

Yan Ren and Tong Xin had their dinner at the airport. I was still feeling full, so I scouted the airport souvenir shop for a hairbrush (having forgotten to pack one in my haste since I was still typing and printing my speech minutes before leaving the house in anticipation of not having a printer in Florida). Then, we took a taxi ride – which cost an eye-watering $100 – in search of our Airbnb.

We booked an Airbnb instead of a hotel because there are no hotels in the vicinity of the competition venue, the Stetson University College of Law. It was just a 15-minute walk away, and after factoring in travel fare between the hotel and Stetson, the Airbnb was just way cheaper.

It started drizzling as we got out of the taxi. To make matters worse, we couldn’t find the door. According to the host, there was supposed to be a number pad where we needed to key in the passcode. Yan Ren went around the perimeter of the property to look for it, only for us to realise that the front ‘gate’ we were standing in front of had been unlocked all along (the number pad was on the door located further inside, after the gate).

My first impressions of the Airbnb: Despite being cheaper than a hotel, the Airbnb is way nicer. There are three bedrooms (meaning we each get our own room), two bathrooms, a dining area and kitchen, a living room, and a heated swimming pool that we won’t be getting much use out of this week.

After unpacking, we walked to Walmart to get groceries. I had cup noodles for dinner and took a shower before climbing into bed. Hopefully, I’m tired enough to avoid the worst of jet lag.

First day of the moot starts tomorrow.

Day 2

Thursday, 13 April, 12.03 pm, Great Hall

The day is going great, no sign of jet lag (so far).

I woke up in a much clearer state of mind. Unfortunately, there are downsides to mental clarity. The very first thing I realised after getting out of bed: when I went to sleep at 10 pm last night, I inadvertently skipped Prof Penner’s Equity & Trusts Q&A session over Zoom, which was 10 – 11 am on Thursday 13 April in Singapore time (before dozing off, I had mentally reminded myself to attend the Zoom call this morning at 10 am before our first round, forgetting that I was now 12 hours behind).

Whoops.

Prof Burton stopped by our Airbnb with breakfast (cereal + oat milk, some strawberry yoghurt) and groceries at 8 am. Then, we all walked to the competition venue together, taking a longer route to avoid roadworks.

The Stetson University College of Law looks like something out of a movie. The campus used to be a Spanish-themed hotel called the Hotel Rolyat, built back in the Roaring 20s before the Great Depression. It was designed to look like a Spanish feudal castle. Prof Burton kept making us stop and take photos in front of anything that looked even remotely picturesque (basically everything) for his moot trailer.

We are currently eating lunch, which has been catered from a local ‘Florribean’ restaurant. It looks like cai png and tastes like a more atas version of Guzman y Gomez. The Ukrainian team has just finished their presentation on the environmental impact of the war with Russia. Now, we're listening to a lecture on the effects of high bycatch and habitat-destroying fishing on maritime piracy. Competition matchups will be announced after lunch.

Thursday, 13 April, 4.01 pm, Dolly & Homer Hand Law Library
A List of Stuff the Stetson Law Library Has That CJ Koh Doesn’t (And That We Could Really Use):

1. Communal puzzle tables (that we lost Prof Burton to for a while)
2. An Elvis standee
3. Therapy animals during exam season
4. A pet wall where Stetson students contribute photos of their pets.
5. A book nook outside the library where students can pick up books even when the library is closed

It turns out I’m not speaking today after all as we have been assigned Azarlus (the applicant) for both the preliminary rounds happening today (I am mooting for the respondent, Rathearre).

In between rounds, I took the opportunity to explore the law library and befriended the librarian, Sally, who has been at Stetson for 40 years. She has extended me an open invite to come back and use the library printers if I ever need to print anything over the next few days. I also visited the school bookshop, and purchased a Champion ‘Stetson Law’ T-shirt.  

Thursday, 13 April, 9.41 pm, Living room, Airbnb

Rewriting the closing of my speech after team practice with Yan Ren and Tong Xin.

Taylor Swift is in Tampa this weekend. On Prof Burton’s suggestion, I am trying to incorporate a Taylor Swift lyric into my closing statement in a blatant attempt to score points with the (mostly local) judges.

My first attempt at rewriting the closing was extremely unfruitful. I ended up writing a poem which summarised the entire moot problem using only Taylor Swift song titles. I joked about reading it out in full tomorrow, but Yan Ren shut that suggestion down (swift-ly?) by groaning and saying he would walk out of the round tomorrow if I actually followed through.

I guess he felt that the judges might not be Ready For It.

Day 3

Friday, 14 April, 5.17 pm, the Mann Lounge

Done with all four preliminary rounds! We are waiting nervously for the announcement on which teams have broken to the quarterfinals (and will have to return tomorrow), and which teams will get to spend their day at the beach.

Keeping my fingers crossed. As a precaution, I went around the campus to take photos of everything in case (touch wood) we don’t break.

Friday, 14 April, 8.05 pm, Tyrone Square Mall

WE BROKE!

And so did the other three Southeast Asian teams we met at the Southeast Asia Regional Rounds (SMU, University of Saint Agustin and University of the Philippines). After agonising for some time over which side to choose, we decided to go with Rathearre (which means I am speaking tomorrow. Gulp).

So, why are we at the mall instead of heading straight back to the Airbnb to prep?

The full story would take too long to write; here’s the abridged version: Tong Xin lost her black formal jacket on the way to Stetson today. We couldn’t find it anywhere despite retracing our steps all the way back to the Airbnb, so we are here to pick up a new jacket for Tong Xin from Macy’s, and dinner from the food court. I had a grilled chicken sandwich and a frosted lemonade from Chick-fil-A.

We are standing outside the mall right now, waiting for an Uber back to the Airbnb. We are just in time to catch the sunset, which looks like someone has gone over the sky with a streaky orange highlighter. Beautiful.

Friday Saturday, 15 April, 1 am, Airbnb living room

We are still up, going over the respondent speeches. Even though she is not speaking tomorrow, Tong Xin has stayed up to bench us too (and for solidarity). Up until 20 minutes ago, when we turned around and realised that she was fast asleep on the sofa.

Yan Ren is coaching me through my responses to questions he thinks might come up tomorrow from the bench. Very little of this is sinking in, and I don’t trust myself to remember any of it during the round tomorrow.

I am worried about letting my team down. Everyone will be disappointed and Tong Xin will have bought her new jacket for nothing.

I feel incredibly frustrated with myself. Law school is full of people who seem to take to mooting effortlessly; I have never been one of them. It is a shameful secret I have carried since I tried out for the team, way before we got to Florida: I’m just not as good of a mooter as my teammates.

Day 4

Saturday, 15 April, 10.30 am, the Mann Lounge

Lost to the Law Society of Ireland. We are out. ☹

Saturday, 15 April, 12.22 pm, Comfort Café

Prof Burton decided we were in dire need of some cheering up. We are eating pancakes at a diner that was a thirty-minute walk away from Stetson.

Now that the moot is over, sharks and pirates no longer feature in our mealtime conversation. Instead, we discuss more pressing things like the upcoming finals (GASP), the education system (a conversation which drifted to CCAs, for some reason) and books.

I am still sad about how the moot went and – if I’m being honest – a little sorry to say goodbye to the royal frilled sharks. Stetson has featured prominently in my life for nearly the whole academic year, and I’ve learned so much and grown as a mooter. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still no way I will ever be drafted for the Jessup team. But I’m definitely a better mooter than I was in September last year.

(Note to future self: If sad, remember that pancakes always make everything better.)

Saturday, 15 April, 4.07 pm, Florin Roebig Courtroom

We will not be flying home empty-handed after all – we won Third Place Memorial. (Prof Burton says this should hammer home the importance of writing a good memorial, even though it is due at an early stage in the preparation process, in November.)

After the pancakes, we headed back to Stetson to watch the final round between the University of West Bengal and the Law Society of Ireland. In a shocking reversal of yesterday, all four Southeast Asian teams were eliminated before the finals (NUS and SMU at quarters, and Saint Agustin and UP at semis).

While waiting for the results to be announced, there was an ‘easter egg quiz’ where participants unscrambled the anagrams of the names mentioned in the moot problem and shouted the answers to win leftover Stetson coffee mugs and shirts (‘Rathearre’ = rare earth; ‘Azarlus’ = Lazarus; ‘Pam Leo C Tilly’ = Polymetallic).

There was a funny moment where Prof Gardner announced that someone had won a ‘big prize’ for explaining what Schrodinger’s Cat (in a moot problem reference to ‘Schrodinger’s fish’) was.

The ‘big prize’ turned out to be a spare East Asia Regional Rounds sweatshirt with the word ‘EARR’ printed on it.

Day 5

Sunday, 16 April, 8.54 am, St Pete Pier/Cassis Bakery

Just watched the sunrise on the St Pete Pier. We all woke up at 5 (despite planning to sleep in) and decided to catch the sunrise. Almost missed it due to bad traffic in downtown St Pete, but we got our pretty sunrise photos in the end!

The plan for the rest of today:

• Return to the Airbnb, shower, pack (no idea how I’m going to fit everything into my 20-inch luggage), and check out by the 11 am deadline
• Uber to the airport, have lunch there
• Buy shark souvenirs for Prof Burton and Prof El
• Board flight to Frankfurt
• AVOID inhaling grey blanket fuzz on Eurowings flight (leave it in its original packaging, DO NOT unwrap!!)

Day 6

(but it feels like Day 5 continued)

Monday, 17 April, 10 am, Frankfurt Airport Transit Area

Arrived in Frankfurt. We have a 12-hour layover ahead of us.

Yan Ren is heading out of the airport for a speed-run of Frankfurt. Tong Xin and I are staying in the airport to sleep and study for Finals.

We are back to 7°C weather and I am freezing. Also, all of the power points at the boarding gates are mysteriously broken.

Monday, 17 April, 6.20 pm, Hausmann’s Restaurant at Frankfurt Airport Public Area

Still at Frankfurt Airport. Tong Xin and I took a break from studying to have lunch at an overpriced Italian restaurant in the transit area that actually made me miss Summit food.

Determined not to repeat our mistake for dinner, we found a nice German restaurant located in the airport. There was just one slight problem: it was in the public area, which meant we had to go through immigration to get to it (and Tong Xin does not have a European visa).

I managed to convince the immigration officials that I was just heading out to dabao dinner for my friend from the public area. So that’s the story of how I have two Frankfurt stamps that are minutes apart on the same page in my passport.

Yan Ren has just texted to inform us that he is on his way back (with German bread and chocolate for us).

Monday, 17 April, 9.45 pm, LH 778 (still at Frankfurt Airport)

On our way home. The moot may be over, but I am constantly reminded that bigger challenges await us in Singapore.

Day 8

(but feels like it's only Day 6)

Wednesday, 18 April, 3.28 am, at home

We landed at Changi Airport at 4.20 pm on Tuesday. After saying goodbye at the airport, I headed home to unpack and sleep.

I found myself awake in bed in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep. It seems that the dreaded jetlag (which I managed, miraculously, to siam for the entire moot) has finally found its way to me.

Where did Tuesday go? It feels like an entire day has somehow been deleted from my life. I check the date on my phone again.

It is a sobering reminder that finals begin in 5 days.

Audition sign-ups for the 2024 edition of the Stetson Moot close on 19 September 2023!

For a more academic perspective of what the moot entails, read this helpimlawst forum post by Ziqin's teammate, Tan Yan Ren.

All picture credits to Nadine Lee.

I think the people who work out in the school gym are brave, because in my two-nearing-three years here, I've never had the inclination to step inside. A few reasons: The buff gym dudes lifting weights, the buff gym dudes benching, the buff gym girls lifting weights, the buff gym girls benching– and the sheer visibility of all of it, since the gym is situated along one long hallway's walk, glass walls all the way. It doesn't actually make sense for any gym to have glass walls, and I feel like the only reason that gyms do is to make sure people aren't doing anything weird in there.

(If you've seen the posters in the CJC club room – which I have seen because Justified shares a club room with them – you know what I mean. And if you haven't, make an educated guess.)

On the second day of Y2, I walked into the CJ Koh Library for the first time. Today, on the first day of Week 4, I walked into the gym for the first time.

Quite literally at first, because there are two doors to the gym and I pulled on the wrong door until my companion told me that we had to enter through the other side.

Immediate impressions: Peace and tranquility. I went in around 3:30pm, so most Y3s had departed after their Evidence lecture, Y2s had departed after Company, and Year 1s were heading to their Contracts lecture. Don't really care what the Y4s were doing. I've seen the gym more packed before, but according to some friends, it's almost never at full capacity. And why is that?

It's because a shocking number of the machines don't work. I tested a weight machine whose name I don't remember now, and there was no resistance at all – my companion confirmed his own experiences.

"Yeah, my friends thought I could lift but there was just no resistance." He seemed only mildly disappointed in himself.

Peace, unfortunately, often metastasizes into staleness, and the longer my companion (let's just call him J) and I stayed, the stickier the air felt. The atmosphere was getting uncomfortable. What an unfortunate time. The few people who were in the gym at that time didn't seem too bothered by it, though, so maybe it's just me and my general aversion to exercise. The treadmills were moving smoothly, and the weight racks… seemed to hold the weights well…? That's as good of an evaluation as I can give. Anyway, here are more pictures of the gym's equipment, so you can have an idea of what it offers.

I should add that I'd like to see the inside of the staff gym one day. There's a specific ILT-slash-Crim prof who's known to make good use of the staff gym, and I guess one day I'll ask him what it's like in there. I imagine it must be to the student gym what the staff lounge is to the student lounge – that is, better in every way, no expenses spared. (Obviously a huge shout out to the people who got the student lounge to look the way it is right now – it became a thing of beauty after the renovation. It's just that the staff lounge is leagues ahead, and you cannot beat a lounge with more than one window.)

(Also, I did not break into the staff lounge, there was a school event and I was there to get some food. But I will say this: The staff lounge has much, much colder water than the rest of the school. Make what you will of that.)

By the time I was done taking pictures, J was getting very restless and I'm pretty sure the other people in the gym thought I was there to do something bad, like steal a barbell.

To be honest, I don't think the BTC gym is as bad as people say it is, or as bad as I thought it was. It can be a little scary to go to a gym where all the walls are made of glass, but if it's any comfort, nobody cares, unless you're a Justified writer coming in to take photos of the equipment. Could the gym use a little sprucing up? Yes. Should it be a priority? I am not authorized to make a statement on that.

Why does the staff lounge have colder water than the student water coolers? That's what I want answers to.

Cheers, and welcome back to school.

When I took my LOA last year, I felt very, very alone. I didn't know any Law students who'd taken LOAs. The idea of an LOA was, in itself, antithetical to what I thought law school was.

Law school was fast paced and intense. Law students weren't supposed to take breaks, because they were supposed to rush through the four years, then take the bar, then get a training contract and then become a lawyer, and they weren't supposed to enjoy it because they had to fill the rest of their time with moots and competitions and internships.

But long story short, I reached a breaking point where I couldn't continue school or I'd explode from stress. What followed was the application for an LOA that I detailed in the article I wrote last year.

(Also, this is a reminder to everyone that you don't have to fit the archetype of what a 'law student' is. If you study law, you're a law student. There's literally nothing more to it, no other prescribed standards that you have to abide by. And you are still a human being, with needs and wants. Don't ever let your identity become 'law student', don't let every thought you have be about law – that's just a slippery slope to a miserable existence.)

As I write this a month before school starts, I want to give an update on what happened during my LOA – this is a sequel to my first article on taking an LOA. It's been an interesting experience.

—

I took my LOA in September, and spent September and October agonizing over what I would spend the next year doing. I'd have to earn my keep, obviously, seeing that I didn't want to feel completely useless. But what sort of job would I take up? I briefly considered taking on a service industry job. But one morning, as I was parsing the Internet, it struck me – why not try something I'd never done before, but desperately wanted to?

(Also, the service industry is brutal. My brother was working in F&B the same time I was on my LOA, and all I can say is oh man. Standing for 10 hours at a time does not a comfortable job make, and I 100% respect everyone who works in the service industry.)

In a fit of sadness at how I'd never make it anywhere in life one morning (6am really isn't late night anymore, but I digress), I sent the following message to Our Grandfather Story.

I'm omitting the rest of the email because it's going to make me lose all my street cred as a cool person who doesn't beg for jobs.

Who am I kidding. To hell with dignity! If you want something, you have to chase it, go after it, pounce on it! Even if it involves begging on your knees! And so one interview and some tests later, I ended up interning with them for 7 months – and for the first time in my life, I was earning money from writing. It was a dream come true. For a moment, I could forget about what I was going to do with my life, and do what I loved.

(At this juncture, I am going to recommend that everyone apply for internships through the NUS portal, because NUS has a stipulated minimum intern wage. But this advice is kinda useless for us law students, so getting exploited it is.)

—
Of all the paths I could've chosen to go down on after my LOA, I acknowledge that this was an unorthodox one. I've compiled a list of the questions I was frequently asked;

1. "You're a law student. What are you doing here?"
2. "Are you still going to become a lawyer?"
3. "Are you dropping out?"
4. "Why did you drop out?"
5. "So you're still going to be a lawyer, right?"

I was irritated most by the first question. It felt as if people assumed that I couldn't study law and also like writing. But as the months passed and I became acutely aware that I was turning 21 in 2023, I understood what they were asking. They were really asking: Are your heart and head in the same place?

Still don't have an answer, and honestly? I don't think I need to answer it, because I can do two things at once. Finance bros call it a side hustle, I call it a monetized hobby. Either way, my long internship was great for me, and I'm glad I did it. I don't think I'd be ready to go back to law school if I hadn't had a taste of what it was like to follow a passion I've had ever since I can remember.

Okay. With that out of the way, though, the most important thing to do during this period was actually to get my head straight. After all, if I did nothing, then this LOA would be for nothing, too. I'm happy to say I am slightly happier than when I was frantically submitting an LOA during Recess Week.

In the eyes of NUS, though, am I really better now?

—

"Are you better now?"

I rub my palms together and hum thoughtfully, making meaningful eye contact with the UHC psychiatrist. She picks up the doctor's note that my psychiatrist wrote, and notes, "It says here that you said you felt 'fine'."

"I do."

She nods, and types something I can't see into her computer.

Here's the process for returning to school after a medical LOA, so that my juniors won't have to go through this alone.

1. You were told when you took the LOA that you'd have to receive a doctor's note certifying a clean bill of health before you were allowed back. So go and get the note.
2. Email the UHC at uhc_health@nus.edu.sg, informing them specifically that you want to book a Fitness Assessment for a counselor to assess you.
3. Do this early, way before school starts in August. This is to make sure you get it done and out of the way, and also just in case there aren't any slots later. I personally did all of this in May 2023.
4. After this, the UHC will advise you to contact the UCS (University Counseling Service) for a date. The UCS will give you a date (referred to as APPOINTMENT 1). Try not to miss this date.
5. They may also ask for proof from your faculty and the UHC that you need a Fitness Assessment. Forward them the email from the UHC. In my case, I also forwarded an email from the Faculty of Law that said I would need a Fitness Assessment. Just out of an abundance of caution.
6. Head down to the UCS on the date. The UCS is upstairs from the UHC, which I didn't know.
7. A UCS counselor, who is also your case worker, will speak to you for about an hour, assessing whether you're fit to return to your course. They will also make a copy of your doctor's letter.
8. This UCS counselor is your main man – they will be the ones collating the UCS psychiatrist's letter and sending it all to your faculty. For this reason, it's a good idea to remember who your counselor is in case you need to liaise with them again. I had an excellent experience with my counselor, Ms Mandy Lee.
9. Your UCS counselor will give you a date to see the UHC psychiatrist (referred to as APPOINTMENT 2). Once again, don't miss this appointment.
10. Head down to the UCS for APPOINTMENT 2. The psychiatrist will ask you more medical-related questions, and do a final check on whether they think you're fit to go back to school.
11. After a while, you'll get an email from NUS that looks like this. Essentially, it's asking you to inform the Law Admin that you intend to come back:

12. Email lawundergrad@nus.edu.sg to tell them that you're coming back.

13. Done!

A plane flies in a holding pattern when it hasn't been given clearance to land yet. I think lots of us don't even know where we're going to be landing yet. Or we feel that the airfield we're hovering over isn't where we want to go. I dunno. But I will say one thing – if you're considering an LOA and have the means to do it, do it. At the same time, I realize that I was lucky to be privileged enough to take a year of school and not really have any tradeoffs, other than a year of my time. I acknowledge that not everyone can afford to take an LOA, and that some people will have to soldier through school battling demons of their own because they can't take a break.

I'm still a work in progress, as I will be tomorrow, as I will be the day after. My story isn't over yet. I have no idea how my restarted-Y2 will go, but I'm comforted by the knowledge that I have a better grip on my own coping mechanisms, and that I kind-of know how it's going to be, having seen my batchmates-now-seniors go through Y2. It's not going to be that hard.

And if it is, all I'll do is bravely soldier forward through the brambles and thicket – after all, the only way out of the dark night is through. We all have to land somewhere one day, and I wish everyone the best. Really. We'll be okay.

The 34th edition of the Singapore Law Review (SLR) Annual Lecture was held in the auditorium of Bukit Timah Campus on Friday, 24 March 2023, from 7-9 pm.

Despite it being the start of the weekend, the lecture was well-attended, with a good mix of members of the legal fraternity, social workers, students and several prolific members of the judiciary.

Since 1984, the Annual Lecture has been the flagship event of the SLR, which is Asia’s oldest student-run legal publication. After two years of holding the Annual Lecture online due to COVID, 2023 marked the Annual Lecture’s long-awaited return to the in-person format.

The event opened with remarks from Mr Darrick Poh, the Chief Editor of SLR, followed by a welcome address by Professor Damian Chalmers, Vice Dean (Research) and Geoffrey Bartholmew Professor at NUS Faculty of Law. Then, Ms Lena Ng, Partner at Clifford Chance (which was the event’s sponsor), introduced Justice Debbie Ong Siew Ling—the guest speaker for this year’s edition of the Lecture.

Hearty chuckles could be heard throughout the auditorium as Justice Ong delivered her opening lines with her signature wit: “Good evening to all of you here, who are spending Friday night at a lecture. It is good to know that this is the life that we all have.”

Justice Ong then quipped that the law school auditorium was where she once used to invigilate exams, “... walking up and down the aisles, hoping to give out more booklets, because in those days, you had to handwrite your answers.”

Justice Ong’s legal career began as an academic at the NUS’s Faculty of Law in 1989, where she specialised in family law. It was therefore unsurprising that for this lecture, Justice Ong chose to talk about family law and the meaning of justice in the family law context.

Justice is normally associated with rights, embodied in the distributive and corrective approaches to justice. Similarly, we usually think of going to the courts as a combative and adversarial experience. However, in Justice Ong’s view, we should demand more of our understanding of justice and of the court’s role in meting out that justice. She thinks that justice should be about healing; the court, a place that we go to for resolution.

“If I had to pick an area where we can showcase what resolution can be, I would pick family law,” said Justice Ong.

Through references to cases, extracts of acrimonious letters sent to opposing counsel, and a heartbreaking letter written from the perspective of a child about shared time, parenting and separation, Justice Ong proceeded to explain the three post-divorce ancillary matters that ‘reorganising a family’s living arrangements’ entails. Then, she laid out her vision for what a legal system that is suited to achieving those aims looks like. To Justice Ong, the answer can only be a legal system built on the principles of therapeutic justice (TJ).

Unlike a rights-based conception of justice, therapeutic justice promotes a non-adversarial system. It is problem-solving, and should be viewed as a lens of care through which we can look at matters and ask whether something would best help parties to move forward, instead of leaving them mired in the past.

The Singapore Court of Appeal has endorsed and applied the concept of therapeutic justice in VDZ v VEA [2020] at [77]:

“TJ is not merely an ideal; it is a necessity. It is not merely theoretical but is intensely practical. It is axiomatic that relationships constitute the very pith and marrow of a family. When familial relationships break down, those relationships (between spouses and between each spouse and the children) are damaged. Such damage cannot be repaired (completely at least) by way of material recompense; healing needs to take place. It is both logical and commonsensical that healing cannot even begin to take place if the parties (in particular, the former spouses) are in an antagonistic relationship - still less when one or both parties wage war against each other. As Justice Ong noted, a kind act begets a kind response while a nasty act inflames the other. …”

Justice Ong identified four hallmarks of a TJ-based family justice system: (1) A non-adversarial system; (2) a problem-solving approach to resolution with upstream access to lawyers, counsellors, mediators and therapeutic and community services and, downstream, a judge-led problem-solving approach; (3) a reliance on subject-matter experts and multidisciplinary TJ teams and (4) being forward-looking and helping parents to appreciate the impact of their actions and their parental responsibility in supporting their childrens’ welfare, instead of penalising bad conduct. To achieve this, Justice Ong called for synergy between the court system, judges and lawyers.

Justice Ong also challenged the audience to think about how the TJ framework could potentially apply to other areas of law beyond family law. For example, civil disputes with an element of relationships gone wrong (e.g. best friends, siblings, business partners where parties have to continue working together even after the litigation ends), and in criminal proceedings, where a judge-led approach could be beneficial in treating witnesses with greater sensitivity.

Finally, Justice Ong touched on some of the challenges in family lawyering in the 21st century: the emotionally charged nature of family work, the demands presented by new court systems (like TJ), the need for mastery in an area of law rich in the doctrines of philosophy, and the globalisation of family law.

Despite these difficulties, Justice Ong remains steadfast in her belief that family law is meaningful, and stressed the need for good mentorship in family law.

“Why do people become lawyers? Justice is really why you come into the legal profession, and I think that family lawyers continue to answer that call to justice. Those of you who are into family law, senior academics, judges: let us inspire the young ones, the next generation, open their eyes to the joys and rewards, the meaningfulness that comes from practising justice. Especially justice that heals.”

During the Question-and-Answer segment, several members of the audience—practitioners, professors and students alike—stepped up to the microphones along the aisles to pose their thoughts to Justice Ong.

Gradually, the questions tapered off and Justice Ong delivered her closing remarks:

“Well, dinner is out there, so…”

This comment was met with rapturous applause from the audience, who quickly streamed out of the auditorium in search of the buffet table (and the classroom where they could sign out to claim their CPD points).

Three surprising attendees of the SLR Annual Lecture were Mandy Lim, Mabel Khor and Naomi Tan from the Dunman High School Law Society. As part of their outreach efforts, the SLR organising committee had contacted some junior college law interest groups through Instagram and invited them to attend the Annual Lecture.

“It was very well organised and I liked the choice of speaker,” said Mandy, who is the President of the Dunman High School Law Society.  “Family law is a very unique area of law and one we don’t hear as much about. [Justice Ong] spoke very concisely, about a topic which is very applicable and important in our conflicted world.” Mabel echoed similar sentiments, adding that although the Dunman High School Law Society had previously invited guest speakers to speak to the club, they had never had someone talk to them about family law before.

The organising committee was pleasantly surprised that the 2023 marked the Annual Lecture’s highest number of sign-ups in a few years—despite being in person.

“I was initially quite worried that the sign-ups for the lecture would be quite lacklustre, as it was held on Friday night and attendees had to make the trip down to BTC,” SLR Chief Editor Mr Darrick Poh shared. “But it was quite heartening to know that we received the highest number of sign-ups that we have had in a while for the SLR Lecture despite the physical format. More than 330 sign-ups, and we even had to close sign ups early as we had reached our venue capacity! The eventual turn out rate was also quite positive, and we have received numerous feedback from attendees that Justice Ong’s lecture was very enjoyable and engaging.

“As the SLR hasn’t had the chance to have an in-person lecture for quite a few years, it was really quite a challenge to put it all together – from finding a sponsor to managing registration to coordinating with many different stakeholders. Nonetheless, I’m really grateful for the support from the rest of the SLR Editorial Board, the Faculty and our sponsor, Clifford Chance. They made the whole organisation and execution of the lecture a lot smoother and much more manageable.”

The SLR Annual Lecture Organising Committee:
Darrick Poh, Chief Editor

Chua Kang Le, Deputy Chief Editor (Journal)

Haziratul Zakirah Binte Ghazali, Deputy Chief Editor (Administration)

Daniel Teo, Secretary

Choi Young Jae, Junior Executive Editor

Chloe Kho, Junior Executive Editor

Tan Suan Kai, Junior Executive Editor

Scott Ngai, Junior Executive Editor

Ashley U, Events Director

Lee Jie Yu, Events Director

Karthikeyan Samyukta, Publicity & Communications Director

At the 2023 NUS Law Career Fair, events and choices abound in this impeccably organised, multi-week, event. But is it enough to help students as they approach the next phase of their lives?

There was a certain point where Eliora Joseph, chair of the Law Club Internal Affairs Directorate, realised that she would not be able to enjoy her long-awaited holiday in Vietnam.

Instead of enjoying Vietnam’s cool December weather, she returned to her hotel room early and booted up her laptop.

A potential tripwire had cropped up in the process of planning the upcoming NUS Law Career Fair, for the various law firms participating in the fair were primed to snatch up the most valuable rest estate the moment the booking portal opened.

It was, in the words of a firm representative, “like buying concert tickets”. Eliora was unsure of just how responsive the portal was going to be with the sudden surge of internet traffic. She had resolved to be available on hand to deal with any potential territorial disputes with the firms.

Meanwhile, back in Singapore, vice-chairman Darius Lee was scrounging for free time from his internship work. He was rushing to prepare the Law Careers Fair booklet, to be given to all those attending the fair. This booklet had been slickly designed over a period of months, and each was to be printed in full colour. But time was running short, as the printing companies required a significant lead time to churn out that many high-quality copies. In the meantime, Darius was busy re-formatting the posters to fit the dimensions of the book, and coordinating with the firms to ensure that none had been left out of the book.

In the end, both of these obstacles were largely overcome without a hitch. But they showed the efforts of the many students that ensured the biggest annual career event in NUS Law - and the largest since the pandemic at that - would go off without a hitch.

The Fair

The NUS Law Career Fair is not really just a fair—it is a festival spanning weeks.. These included various Seminar Talks conducted by various well-established firms in Singapore, and a “Fireside Chat”, a sharing session conducted by recently graduated students.

These events culminated in the Firm Exhibitions, a boisterous, two-day affair, where hundreds of firms of all shapes and sizes--small, medium, boutique, Big Four, international and the Government, set up booths across the campus. With any festival, of course, there were to be certain pre-requisites: food, gifts, bonding, and most importantly—a crowd.

And what a crowd it was. All in all, over 1,500 students attended the various events held.

Seminar Talks

I was no exception, of course. I had signed up for two of the seminar talks myself, even before I volunteered to cover the event for Justified. As a Year 2 student, the question of where I was going to work at, and what that place was going to be like, weighed on me heavily. I hoped that by attending these events, I would get a better idea on what I could do in the future.

The first talk, hosted by Drew & Napier, was entitled “What The Firm Is Looking for When Selecting Practice Trainees/Potential Hires”.

It was a Friday morning but the auditorium was three-quarters full. The panel, chaired by Mr Adam Maniam, director of Disputes Resolution at Drew & Napier, expounded on the various ways that one could stand out while on internship. For their part, the audience, which consisted mostly of year 1s and 2s, hung on to every word as the panel discussed the different ways one could make a good internship application.

At the end of the seminar, Mr Maniam closed the panel with a rather insightful exhortation for aspiring lawyers to give themselves the time to “get good” at what they did, by persevering in the legal industry.

All in all, the seminar was highly engaging, and full of practical tips for any aspiring intern.

Next, I attended the Seminar Talk hosted by Allen & Gledhill, entitled “The Right Fit, The Right Firm. What Is Right for You? Transitioning From Law School to A Law Firm”.

This too, was very well-attended. The panel was hosted by Mr Ramsesh Selvaraj, who is co-deputy head for the firm’s International Arbitration Practice. They talked about what working at Allen & Gledhill would be like, as well as the internship and/or training contract experience there.

The Fireside Chat

The next event that I attended was the Fireside Chat. This consisted of a panel of recently graduated students who had returned to share about their working experiences and insights. A few of the names immediately stood out to me, such as Kay Han and Jia Wei of je.helpimlawst fame. (Full disclosure: I would not have survived law school without their notes)

As perhaps might be expected, they both appeared to be having similarly illustrious starts to their careers, as a law clerk in Latham & Watkins, and a Justices Law Clerk, respectively.

But there too, were many other interesting stories from the rest of the panel. There was Benjamin Wong, a Sheridan Fellow at NUS (and who I should probably address as Mr Benjamin Wong, in case he teaches me someday). There was Nithya Devi, who specialises in family law, and shared with us her passion for human rights issues. There was Peter Huang, an LLM student from China, now specialising in maritime law. And there was Ho Ting En, who I probably related most to—she introduced herself by saying “I’m pretty normal.”

“We were really looking to have a diverse group of panelists,” Vice-Chairman Darius shared with me later, “I think everyone has different aspirations, so it was really important for us to look for people with different backgrounds, in different firm types and practice areas.”

And this was indeed reflected in the different stories shared by the panelists, such as Sheiffa Safi, who reflected on her experience working under Mr Davinder Singh. Meanwhile, Nithya talked about her much more unconventional path, with her love for human rights taking her to an internship in the United States.

The Firm Exhibitions

If there were a student in the Bukit Timah Campus who was unaware of the existence of the Firm Exhibitions, the first sign that something was unusual would come when they arrived at the car park. Lines of vans and cars surrounded the campus buildings as firm representatives rushed to unload materials for their booths.

Entering the campus building, they might notice something different in the atmosphere—a palpable feeling of excitement, as students sought to learn more about what awaited them after graduation.

On both exhibition days, students would pour in the moment the doors opened. Gifts and souvenirs from the firms were snapped up quickly, and there were so many of them that one would quickly run out of hands to hold them in.

These gifts were often useful (and occasionally delicious) too, consisting of things like portable chargers, power adapters, umbrellas, pens, notebooks, cookies, popcorn, cold brew coffee among many others. No wonder then, that tote bags (which were given by some firms) became a hot commodity, running out long before the end of the day.

Long lines also formed at most booths, as students converged around firm representatives, trying to find an opening to introduce themselves. And as I found out the hard way, one had to be strategic in how one approached a firm representative:

I had been waiting to engage with a firm representative at an international firm booth, as the student before me enquired about the practicability of doing a multi-national training contract after graduation (clearly someone knew more about what they were doing than me). After she concluded her conversation with that student, the firm representative turned to me.

“Hi!” she beamed.

“Hi, nice to meet you!,” said another student as he strategically stepped in between us, before delving into a long question on internships.

I decided to try my luck at another booth.

-

The Firm Exhibitions are largely a social affair, not just between firm representatives and students, but also between students, who thronged the fair in groups; and as it turned out, between the firm representatives themselves too.

“Many of them shared with me how happy they were that they could get to see their old classmates and friends at the fair again,” Darius shared after the event.

Similarly, most of the firm representatives seemed quite pleased at the turnout.

“For us, this exhibition is about introducing our brand to the students and growing our name,” a firm representative told me, and beaming, he added, “It’s been a resounding success!”

On the other side of campus:

Despite the massive turnout at all the career fair events, not every student was enthused about going. A number of students I talked to sounded reluctant, or outright said that they were not interested in attending.

“The returns would be marginal—everything boils down to grades at the end of the day anyway,” a Year 2 student who declined to be identified told me.

And this was somewhat of a recurring trend amongst some students throughout all the events. After the Fireside Chat, when I asked one of the attendees what he thought about it, he expressed that it was probably easy for the panelists “to look back on their law school journey with rose-tinted glasses”, and he could not really relate to them.

He expressed his wish that the panelists would have talked more about their struggles in law school, and their practical advice for dealing with that, “especially since there was a good proportion of students that don’t do that well.”

I put these concerns across to a number of firm representatives that I talked to, and most were empathetic.

“Well I think that it's precisely if one’s grades aren’t that good, that you should attend the fair,” said one.

Another representative, from a Big Four firm, told me somewhat sheepishly that he “barely scraped a 2:1”, and that he secured his training contract through gaining exposure from internships.

Mr Marcus Ng, an associate at Selvam LLC, also had a similar thought, “I think the point of the career fair is an opportunity to be taken, and one shouldn’t get the thought that because ‘my grades aren’t so good’ that you wouldn’t be considered.”

Cyril Teo, a Year 2 undergraduate, shared with me that although he would attend the exhibition, it was mostly because everyone else was going too.

“I think its would be hard, to find my dream firm at the fair,” he said, “because to be honest most firm representatives will keep to the ‘party line’ or ‘firm line’ as such, so you can only get an idea of whether you would enjoy working there if you are properly immersed in it.”

“Yes, of course firm representatives would toe the ‘party line’,” another said, “but you can still get a sense of what the firm is like by talking to people, and some are more willing to share than others.”

“Your grades can't be bad," A Singapore Judicial Service spokesperson told me. "But the most important thing is character. It’s not just enough to not be a bad person (to progress in the Judiciary service)Ultimately, the question is, ‘Are you kind?’”

Will I be happy?

Underlying the festive atmosphere of the Law Careers Fair however, I felt that there was a sense of anxiety by many students--an anxiety of what the future holds. It could be seen from the repeated questions of internships and training contracts that students keep asking each other, queries of firm culture and working experiences.

As university students, the next step in our life journey is typically to start a career and enter the working world. But it is a step fraught with uncertainty, and I suppose, we try to make up for it by finding out as much about it as possible.

Fortunately, (or perhaps unfortunately), this does not seem to be a question that we, as students, have to answer right now. When I asked the panelists, at the Fireside Chat, what they were working for in their jobs, they seemed a little bit surprised at the question.

Despite what some might stereotype about lawyers being uptight and stuffy, I was surprised by the depth of diversity of lawyers at the Careers Fair. I found that most were more than willing to share their experiences with us.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the Careers Fair when I interviewed a Year 1 student at the Exhibition.

“I think I have found my dream firm,” she relayed excitedly. “I had a really good talk with them, and they were talking about how much they value work life balance, and family time, which is something that is important for me.”

“I think I will want to work there in the future."

A new stall opening at the summit is a HUGE thing. Having never seen a queue at the previous spinach soup stall and suddenly seeing people line up to get a taste of the new fish soup, this was news. Where there is a long queue for food, there will definitely be something good there. However, even though I was not disappointed, I was not impressed either.

If you’re thinking whether to try the fish soup stall and whether it’s worth it, here is my 100% personal but honest review. If you’ve tried it, I hope this article won’t veer too far of from your own experience.

The first thing that struck me as I was queueing for the food was the signboard. Everything listed there was pricey beyond what I would have normally expected of a school canteen. With the cheapest thing on the menu being $5.90, I was a little taken aback at the prices. Had you asked me to pay such prices if I were at a normal hawker centre in the heartlands, I would have rolled my eyes and walked away. However, as a sad and desperate student in BTC looking for new food options, I continued queueing anyway.

I ordered the fried fish bee hoon soup which was $5.90 and incidentally among the cheapest options on the menu. The serving was huge and generous which almost made me forget how overpriced it was. Possibly a side effect of being a slow eater and ordering fried fish, but the fish got real soggy really quick which was just a little bit disappointing. The bee hoon noodles were…average and expected. The soup was flavourful but could certainly have been better. There was also just one lettuce leaf in the soup which I would not exactly consider a balanced meal, taking into account all the fried fish.

The sliced fish soup was given an almost similar verdict with the exception that the fish did not get soggy because it was not fried. I would recommend this if you do not like your fish soggy or if you prefer sliced fish to fried fish. Either way, you pay $5.90.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this a solid 6.5. This is the kind of dish I would go to on a rainy day just because it is warm and soupy but not something I would actively crave. In 3 simple words: It’s just okay. If I wanted to change it up from the usual chicken rice, I would still need to consider how much it costs.

Worth it? Meh.