To be revolutionary doesn’t require pitchforks and burning torches.

Photo: Liberty Leading The People by Eugène Delacroix

For those of you who don’t know me too well - and what a strange thing to say, because do we truly know anybody? - I have a master’s in international security.

Which means that for two years in my twenties, I held a full-time job in the government while pursuing a part-time master’s degree on the ways in which security threats are created and then mitigated in an international environment. Topics I studied included intelligence, nuclear war and weaponry, strategic studies, Russian politics (!) and many other strange and wondrous things.

I had just graduated from my university in England when, during a casual chat with one of my professors, I was offered the opportunity to continue studying if I wished. The year was 2013, and I was preparing to return to Singapore to begin “serving my bond” - a six-year contract with the government that had funded my education. I felt trapped, terrified, and completely uninspired by the thought of going back to Singapore, a place that held too many painful memories, where I had always felt like an octagon trying to fit into a square space.

Choosing to study something I was genuinely interested in felt like an act of rebellion - something I was doing solely for myself, a selfish, secret decision. I didn’t know what the point of the master’s would be - only that I had really enjoyed my undergraduate degree, and that it had taught me to see the world in a way entirely different from what I had previously known. Why not, I thought. Let’s do this.