I have fond memories of the 1988 class. In the year 1988, I got my promotion to full professor, bought a new car, hired a new secretary, and taught part of a course in AI. But that is not why I am fond of this class. The class was my kind of class.
The 1988 class was the 3rd batch of the new ISCS degree, which comes with an honours year. It was the first batch when the best students all stayed for honours, and produced the largest number of first class honours, 11. It has the largest number that took up an R&D/academic career, with more than a dozen staying in the dept to work, and more than 10 have completed PhDs, with five working in this School as lecturers and others in ISS, NTU, HKUST/CityU, US universities.
In fact, the 1988 class solved our staffing problem, at least for a while. The large number staying on to work in 1989 even gave us some fat from which we lived off for several years. It established the tradition that the best stay on, and we could even afford to pick and choose whom to keep and whom to let go.
But why am I so pleased about being able to hire NUS graduates and having them stay on long term? Getting the best students to stay for honours is hardly something you can talk about on TV or newspaper as big achievements, and shouldn't we be hiring MIT/Stanford graduates? Is Prof Yuen promoting mediocrity because he is such a mediocre person?
Let me answer by telling you a story about Bill Gates. 20 years ago, when there was no IBM PC and Microsoft was a small company selling Basic compilers, mostly for the Apple II computer, Bill was getting a bit bored and wanted to sell out. He negotiated with Ross Perot, asking for $15M. Perot found the price too high and Bill kept his company.
Soon after a team from IBM came to ask him to provide an operating system for their new PC, and Bill sent them away to another company called Digital Research which had more experience with OS, but then the visitors came back because their negotiation with Digital Research broke down almost immediately. So Bill bought the rights of a disk operating system written by a computer shop owner in Seattle, and got his people to fit it to IBM requirements. The rest is history.
What is the moral of the story? Bill Gates never had a business plan expanding his company into OS to make himself the richest person in the world. In fact, he did not know that one day his company would be worth $100B. It happened to him, but this was more than just by luck. It was because he had an organization to marshall resources and solve the problems that came along, the core infrastructure that can make good use of his opportunities.
I too had no business plan, but I wanted a core organization, which can be built by attracting good students, getting them to stay in the department and make careers in it; some may go to study overseas later; some may want to work in other organizations in Singapore; some may get PhDs here and work in another country, but we must always have a strong core, with people who do good work, and can cooperate with their friends elsewhere too.
When we get the top graduates from Qinghua or Fudan or PhDs from MIT, and I do want them, they need to be planted into fertile soil, to work alongside fellow students and colleagues who are happy and productive, Then they are convinced that we are worthy of them. That is why having a good, stable core is so important. With it, you can aim for something even better.
You certainly can attract some good people by persuasion, by using special incentives, but special is not regular; organizations achieve results by doing regular work, by doing things everyone is used to doing and can do with skill and practice, not by special things that they are amateurs in and not very good at. Of course regular work is not sexy; not usually exciting; it is seldom suitable for TV or newspaper reports.
So you see why 1988 remains a special year for me. But so is 1998. We have left the Faculty of Science and become a School of Computing, and I just bought another car... Let me hope that 10 years from now, I shall again look back with special memories.
Professor Yuen Chung Kwong
29 August 1998