Encircling the flames

I was seventeen. I didn’t own a passport. I’d never been on a plane. The extent of my ‘cultural exchange’ was one Toorak party where, reciting Hamlet’s first soliloquy, I tried to woo the private schoolgirls before they realised ‘this too too solid flesh’ belonged out near Dandenong.

After leaving high school, my friends and I started tutoring the kids in the years below us and advertising our classes on Facebook. It was a cash job, quick but consistent, and we mucked around all holidays in the state library. In January, I was shortlisted for an interview with Yale-NUS.

Ten minutes before the Skype call, I looked up the college on Wikipedia. It had already admitted national athletes, professional actors and entrepreneurs. In the interview, I said I’d started a tutoring company, that my co-founders and I wanted to make tuition accessible to public school students, that building something new was incredibly rewarding. ‘Just like,’ I said, ‘how rewarding it will be to build the Yale-NUS community.’

To this day, I’m unnerved by how well I sold myself. But to the admissions team of a start-up college, selling was as natural, and as satisfying, as taking a shit.