Good work-life balance - Student Affairs Office Yale-NUS College Employee Review

-Warm, friendly people -Variety in work

-NUS sucks -Couldn't stay there long enough

If you believe in the mission of residential small liberal arts colleges, then this place generally aligns with that. Colleagues were mostly good folks, usually faculty disagreements on priorities and methods aside. Teaching load was reasonable (at least if you weren't a scientist) and compensation was very generous. The campus was beautiful (if not the best engineered in places).

Well the biggest issue is that the college is closing, so best not accept a job there if you want to do anything that isn't temporary. But besides that, it was a tough place to be tenure-track as a scientist. With parent institutions of Yale and NUS they just don't understand the scope of what is reasonable for scientists to do research-wise when one only works with undergraduates, the labs are (mostly) over at NUS, and scientists have the same teaching load as the humanists and social scientists. So the scientists had to de-prioritize teaching quality a shocking amount for a SLAC in order to be competitive for tenure. Plus the "common curriculum" eating the first 1/3rd of students' education made for very interesting educational challenges - compressed timescales for sequencing, not being able to require enough courses in the major, not being able to offer lab classes in parallel to the lecture courses, and not having enough staff to teach those courses (since we need to teach in the common curriculum). They also tried to encourage interdisciplinarity by not having proper departments and mixing faculty offices all over campus, which just made it hard to find your colleagues who you might actually collaborate with. Plus cultural differences between fields (and maybe also it's just Singapore thing), meant everyone's office doors were closed all the time, and it felt way more isolating than other institutions I've been at. The other biggest problem is that there was so much red tape. You could get grant money easily enough, but good luck spending it - make sure everything get signed for approval by 3 different people, get evaluations done on expensive purchases by people who are not qualified to judge (to make sure you aren't paying off a friend), must have internal paperwork done in the right font, etc. Admin's requests of you were all urgent, but good luck getting a timely response from them. The scientists who were "lucky" enough to have their labs on campus chronically had the strictest versions of the rules applied to them. During the founding, it was thought having lab space at NUS would be a perk... But good luck getting any department to willingly give you space. So that meant none of the campus labs were properly built for research. They thought our peer institutions were places like Amherst, Pomona, etc. (and Rice?) but we did not have nearly their resources for science. So overall, good intentions, but very naive execution. Despite its flaws, its closure was not its fault. NUS unilaterally decided to pull out for no good reason - it was blamed on the fact that it cost more to educate students (which was known at the time of founding - when you have fewer students per classroom it obviously costs more, but that was part of the sell on quality) and that it couldn't fundraise enough to meet the endowment goals (which were developed around Yale-levels fundraising, and not at all suitable for the culture of Singapore and a new institution). The truth is probably more to do with the political ambitions of the new NUS president who appears to be all about efficiency and money based on the other changes he's made. The college had no one pulling for it in the Ministry of Education anymore, so that was that.