Came on SG tuition grant, leaving a mark on the city

By Christie Loh

SMU Office of Research – When August rolls around for 24-year-old Emma Grimley, it will mark the end of her three-year post-university bond to Singapore. Should she decide to return to her home country of Canada, she will take with her a suitcase of made-in-SG memories and, most tangibly, a prize for her research work at Singapore Management University (SMU).

A Research Assistant at SMU’s College of Integrative Studies, Grimley is among four recipients of the 2024 SMU Research Staff Excellence Awards. She was nominated by Professor of Geography Orlando Woods, who also heads the SMU Urban Institute, for her contribution to a major research project on smart cities. It was for this project that Grimley was hired in 2022, right after graduating from Yale-NUS College with a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies.

MOE Tuition Grant for locals and foreigners

She was part of the batch of fresh graduates that entered a global economy still shaky from the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike her peers who could cast their net worldwide, Grimley was obligated to find work with a “Singapore entity” for three years under the terms of the Ministry of Education (MOE) Tuition Grant for a foreigner. The bond was in exchange for a near-27 per-cent subsidy in annual fees for international students during their four years here, according to figures published on the website of Yale-NUS College, which is shuttering this year after opening in 2011 as Singapore’s first liberal arts institution.

Anecdotally, the availability of the Tuition Grant for both foreign and Singaporean students is not widely known, even though its main stated requirement is not onerous: The applicant must already have gained admission into a full-time diploma or undergraduate course in an Institute of Higher Learning in Singapore. Citizens get the highest subsidy. During the years 2017 to 2023, an average of around 2,900 international students on the Tuition Grant graduated yearly from Singapore’s polytechnics and autonomous universities. One of them was Grimley.

“Coming to Singapore is a huge adjustment,” she told the Office of Research when asked what advice she had to offer a student contemplating a move to Singapore. “But I think it can be extremely rewarding if you approach it the right way. It’s all about having an open mind and learning as much as you can about the place where you are.”

A look at smart towns and smart cities

Her work at SMU brought her into the local heartlands and outside of Singapore.

Much of her time is spent on Professor Woods’ MOE Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2 project, “Technocratic Regionalism in Southeast Asia: The Translational Politics of Smart City Knowledge Transfer”. The three-year qualitative research project’s other principal investigator is Professor Lily Kong, President of SMU. The project has taken Grimley on field trips to various parts of Southeast Asia to interview some 300 individuals from the public and private sectors, advocacy groups and even villagers. Key findings will be presented at a workshop hosted by the Urban Institute in April and events at SMU’s Overseas Centres in Jakarta and Bangkok in June.

One of the spin-offs from the technocratic regionalism research was a look at the impact of Smart Towns created by Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB). These public housing estates contain technological features such as motion-activated lighting in common spaces and barrier-less smart parking systems – all in the name of raising the standard of living.

After interviewing 17 residents of Yuhua, Punggol Northshore and the upcoming Tengah Smart Towns, Grimley wrote a paper on the lofty vision’s limited impact on daily life due to various reasons such as the perception that the smart features were mere conveniences rather than being life-transforming, and residents’ anxiety over the long-term use of technology. The paper is currently under review in a journal focused on studies of housing.

A Research Assistant with publications to her name

Concurrently with the smart cities research, Grimley was a collaborator on a project exploring feelings of (un)belonging amongst Indian international students in Singapore. For this project, she was lead author on three published papers. Fresh off the press in March was a paper in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, which explored how the celebration of religious festivals in international schools can shape the formation of “more-than-Indian citizenship pathways”.

It is not every day that early-career research staff get top billing, so to speak. For that, Grimley is grateful to Professor Woods.

“A Research Assistant is kind of like the bottom rung of the research ladder, you know – nothing wrong with that!” she said, listing literature review and transcription among her fundamental job duties. “But within Orlando’s project, it has allowed me to grow within that role and gained new skills, and not be doing something repetitive for three years.” Managing a project, making field trips overseas and conducting interviews are some of the things she learnt on the job.

In fact, Grimley feels that working at SMU has been “a very good way to transition from my, in some ways, insulated undergrad environment – which I loved, I will sing the praises of Yale-NUS forever – but it was a very academically-inclined environment,” she said. Contrast that with SMU, “which is a ‘practically-oriented’ university in Singapore, very determined to make an impact”.

Overall, she said, “These three years here helped me develop skills that will serve me whether I continue in research or not.”

And whether or not she stays in Singapore after her bond ends, Grimley has a fond place in her heart for the local food and wildlife. She can chat at length about the “cute” itinerant otters with celebrity status and the “charming” monitor lizards roaming the Botanic Gardens. Or where to find the best mala xiang guo in the Clementi neighbourhood. “Hard to choose a favourite Singaporean food!” she said, but “you can’t go wrong with a good old Ya Kun breakfast set”.