1. Good afternoon to all our award recipients, teachers, principals, families, fellow colleagues from the public service agencies and many of our partner companies from the commercial sector.
2. This is a very special afternoon for all of us in Singapore and also for MOE. Today, we are gathered here for the inaugural investiture to celebrate and affirm our first batch of engineering and tech programme scholarship recipients – or what we call ETPS in short.
3. All our award recipients have demonstrated great interest and aptitude for science and technology. We want to spur them on.
4. Why did we have this scholarship? Engineering and science is very crucial to us as a country. The quality of our lives and the kind of economic opportunities that we have going forward will very much depend on the quality of our science and technology and engineering capabilities.
5. Engineers are innovators and creators of our future. It will be even more so going forward. Just outside this hall, you see the range of projects that our scientists and engineers are involved in. From day-to-day projects that improve the quality of our lives, to projects that show out-of-the-box thinking. Some of them are existing solutions that we have already found. Many are also problem statements that we are looking for solutions to. Ultimately, the solutions may not just benefit fellow Singaporeans in Singapore, but they can also be scaled beyond Singapore to make an impact, and a difference to the rest of the world.
6. In this increasingly connected world, it is all the more important for us to strengthen our science and engineering capabilities. And we want them to start young. This is why we started this scholarship to send a strong signal of our continued emphasis on science and technology, together with engineering. We want to inspire yet another generation of scientists, technologists, and engineers to help build our future together. I'm happy to say that the ETPS was very well received with more than 500 applicants from all our pre-university colleges. This bodes well for our engineering sector, as well as for our next generation.
7. Interestingly, our selection process was also quite novel. The selection process did not take into account just the academic capabilities of our students. We are looking for students with a deep passion in science and engineering. We want people who are not just good with theories and abstract concepts. We also want students who have passion, creativity, gumption to try something new, to build something, tinker with something, improve something. So, unlike one-on-one interviews in usual scholarship interview formats, the shortlisted students were placed in groups to discuss problems and explore solutions, because we also want students from diverse backgrounds to come together to bring their different disciplines to solve emerging problems. These are the qualities that we want to see in our students.
8. As many of you will know, many of the most exciting ideas in the world of science and engineering today come from the intersection of conventional disabilities. This is also how we would like to see our students go forth and develop their capabilities.
9. To give you a glimpse of some examples, we have Jarius Ting from Jurong Pioneer Junior College. What did he do to impress the panel? His mother found that her hairdryer wasn't working. He tinkered with it, troubleshot, figured out what went wrong, and got it working again. He presented it back to his mother as a Mother's Day present.
10. Then we have Aaron Ng from Hwa Chong Institution, who proposed enhancing a drone, and to make it into a dragon-shaped one to serve as a toy. You might be wondering – so what has the drone and it being dragon-shaped have to do with engineering? Well, the fact that you dared to try, the fact that you dared to experiment and tinker with it, is something invaluable.
11. These are the kinds of students that we are looking for.
12. Now, for all the students present here today: Later during the seminar, you will hear more exciting ideas of projects that you can look forward to working on in time to come; the type of programmes that you will be exposed to.
Big, hairy, audacious goals
13. On this occasion, I would just like to leave you with three "BHAGs": Big, hairy, audacious goals that relate to Singapore's future. And I hope that somewhere in your career going forward, you will be able to remember these three BHAGs and help us to solve some of the big challenges facing Singapore.
14. So, the first BHAG: For us to be a carbon neutral country. Now, that is easier said than done. Today, almost 100% of our energy sources come from fossil fuels. Renewables, in the form of solar energy, forms only a few percentage points of our energy sources. How can we break free from the carbon constraints for us to have a higher quality of life and more economic opportunities that is not constrained by our carbon budget? Increasingly in Singapore, what determines the kind of economic opportunities that we can have? It's not just about the land size, the financial resources that we have, the quality of people we have. But it is also whether we can overcome the carbon constraint. Can we have more renewables? Today, the best-in-class renewables or solar has an efficiency rate of about 20 to 25%. Can we double that? Can we triple that? Today, many people think that Singapore is a sun-drenched country. But we know that Singapore is also overcast 80% of the time, and we cannot collect as much solar energy as we would like.
15. How do we overcome all these constraints and turn ourselves into a carbon-lite, or a net-zero country? That is our big, hairy, audacious goal. Can we do it? Let's look at the story of water. Once upon a time, we had limited water for our own sustenance and industry use. We had three reservoirs; we had to import water. Over the last 50 years, every possible river that can be dammed up to form a reservoir, we have done it. From three reservoirs to 17 reservoirs now. Of the entire island of 700 square kilometers, there are about two-thirds of the land area used for water catchment.
16. Today, we have been able to bring down the price of desalination, and NEWater is pretty much comparable to freshwater. With a generation's effort, we have turned water from a constraint into an opportunity. We have firms exporting water technologies to many parts of the world that are freshwater starved. If we can do that for water in the last generation, let's strive to do that for energy in the next generation. If a small, little place like Singapore without natural resources can overcome our fossil fuel dependence, then we will have opened up many new opportunities for many other cities around the world. So that's the first BHAG that I will leave behind for our students to think about.
17. The second BHAG – the second big, hairy, audacious goal – How much space do we have in Singapore?
18. How can we continue to grow, improve our quality of life, and have more exciting economic opportunities for our people? Previously, people said that we have about 500 square kilometers of land. Now, we have about 700 square kilometers. But that's not all that we have. We have sea space and air space as well.
19. The question then is this: how can we continue to improve our quality of life, build better flats for our people, have more industries within this space of about 1000 square kilometers of two-dimensional land and sea space, but with unlimited height or depth space.
20. We have projects, such as the Deep Tunnel Sewerage System which runs across the entire island to recycle water, the Jurong Rock Caverns, the aquaculture that you see in our waters, or the complex solutions that we have had to come up with to manage our airspace and four or five runways at airports. How do we optimise this amount of space to keep improving the quality of life and economic opportunities for our people?
21. Therein lies our second BHAG. Is it possible? Certainly. Today, what we proudly know as Marina Bay and Gardens by the Bay used to be the sea. What used to be a dirty and smelly Singapore river is now part of Marina Barrage.
22. There are immense opportunities for what we can do on the surface of land and sea; there are also immense opportunities of what more we can do underneath the surface and above ground. Once upon a time, we had a two-dimensional map that laid out the whole of Singapore. Today, our agencies are building a three-dimensional map to look at the different layers underground that we have to integrate in order to build the kind of quality environment that we want. What more can we imagine for our little island that will allow us to transcend our geographical constraint?
23. Third BHAG: how we use our science, engineering, and technological capabilities to entrench our relevance to the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become even more apparent that our economic livelihood and survival is not just about making money. It is about being able to produce things that are of value and relevance to the world; that makes us not easily displaced by other people. How can we have those niche engineering and science capabilities that allow us to create more economic opportunities for ourselves, that do not depend on the size of our population, or the size of the land that we have?
24. There are many interesting companies in Singapore today, defining their own niches in their respective industries. They are in niche areas that many of us may not even know about. But collectively, they all add to the economic diversity and resilience of our country, that even in the toughest of times, our economic livelihoods will not be displaced.
25. However, there is nothing static in this competition. People will find new ways to do things; they will compete with us. It's a continuous process for us to keep thinking of what new ideas we can have to produce things that are of relevance and value to the world, that makes us hard to displace. How do we keep making sure that we are one step ahead of the competition? Therein lies the tremendous challenges and opportunities for many of you.
26. Many of you will know that actually in the petrochemical space, we are one of the hubs in the world. In the biomedical space, we are also one of the hubs in the world. On all these dimensions, we compete not on the basis of cheaper land or cheaper labour costs. We compete on the basis of the quality of our ideas and the kinds of product innovation that we can add and bring to the market. This is how we entrench our relevance to the world. This is a work in constant progress, generations after generations, never resting on our laurels.
27. On that note, I'm sure the rest of the seminar speakers will inspire you with more challenging problems for you to think about as you go forward. But remember, science and engineering will be fundamental to our quality of life and our livelihoods, now and forever. We hope that you will always retain the strong fundamentals that you have built up, be bold to tinker and explore, be bold to collaborate beyond the conventional disciplines. Hopefully, you will help us solve some of these BHAGs, be it our energy sustainability, our space utilization, or our economic relevance to the world. Congratulations and thank you for stepping forward, to serve, to learn, and to grow in the science and engineering community. Thank you very much.