Hello, world!
My name is Zihan and this is my first ever venture into writing (for a general audience, on a public platform)! I thought I’d kick things off by sharing a bit about myself, my motivations for writing and the direction I hope to keep my articles in.
I’m a rising third-year student at the National University of Singapore, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). My specialisation is Political Science, and my academic interests lie in East Asia — everything including regional geopolitics, culture, history and language! I’m currently studying Japanese and my goal is to be somewhat proficient in it after my 4 years in university. My hobbies include sewing, reading, writing and a ton of Youtube — I’m working on dedicating less time to the last bit and allocating more to the former three.
I have several motivations that are compelling me to write. I’ve always thought of writing as a cathartic activity that helps me organise my thoughts into a (somewhat) coherent chunk of words with a logical flow. Unlike most things, I don’t think I’m halfway bad at it, either. However, up to this post, my writing has been limited to: 1) academic writing for various modules (i.e. essays and papers), 2) long captions on my Instagram posts and stories whenever I get the sudden urge to chronicle my personal reflections on various experiences, or rants about socio-political issues I care about.
I’ve only seriously thought about writing for a public audience earlier this year. As you all would know, the job market this year has been downright terrible as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and I felt its effects as I sent close to 50 internship applications from December 2019 to May 2020. I was originally determined to land an internship in the field of governance and international relations — roles relating to public policy, foreign service, research and the like. However, when the reality of my abysmal internship prospects started sinking in, my desperate application frenzy was fuelled further, and I started branching out my options and applying to roles that had just the slightest chance of considering my application. This included editorial and content marketing internships — basically anything that listed “proficient writer” as a requirement in their job descriptions.
There was just one problem. I didn’t have any portfolio to back up my supposed writing credentials!
So, yes, practicality is a big motivation behind my venture into writing. However, aside from raising my employment prospects, I have more personal, idealistic motivations. Many a times, people often have a mistaken impression of me after I tell them what I’m studying. They think I’m a know-it-all who’s well-rounded in classics and philosophy, that I have a deep of understanding of the economy, that I’m able to give a nuanced response when Grab drivers ask me about my opinions towards pertinent political issues. The truth is that I have an embarrassingly shallow understanding of the very three disciplines I’m studying. (This might be partly attributed to the Dunning-Kruger effect — as Aristotle said perfectly, “the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know”.)
At the same time, I’m far from indifferent or apathetic. After posting a few rants on Instagram earlier this year, which included my thoughts on noticeably heightened Sinophobia since the onset of COVID-19 and the ethics and rationality of voting in light of the recent General Elections in Singapore, I’ve managed to instigate discourse with my peers on these issues. The exchanges I’ve had were extremely enlightening, and I’ve found myself learning immensely from citizen journalism and such exchanges as a result of social media.
However, I realised that my dearth of contextual knowledge on many things have limited my understanding on them. I’d like both myself and my peers to have an enhanced understanding on salient issues our society and world faces today. And I‘m hoping that through Medium, I’ll be able to push myself to put forth my opinions in a more structured, coherent manner, and that the research I’ll conduct in writing my op-eds would enable me to have a more holistic understanding of various issues today.
Moving forward, I’ll be mainly posting op-eds on issues I care about that have hitherto gone largely unnoticed, or could do with a lot more attention or alternative perspectives. My personal goal is simple — to make writing a habit by posting consistently, with a wider objective to expand my knowledge and hopefully, yours too.
To anyone who makes it up to this point, thank you so much for reading! I’ll be posting my very first piece of writing very soon, so stay tuned.
