Throughout the trip, I learned much about things he never noticed before. This is especially true about what it meant to live without the constant supervision of a parent. No longer relying on parents to wake me up in the morning, I needed to manage his every second and minute to the tee. Instead of following his parents through the unknown territory of a foreign country, I had to learn the convoluted map of different areas and know what form of transportation he needed to use to get from where he lived to where he wanted to go. Through this trip, I gained much more experience as to what it meant to be independent. It was as if it were training for college. Although there was always someone watching his back in Singapore since he usually traveled with a group of other coral reef ambassadors, I learned that he should always be aware of his surroundings and belongings whenever he is outdoors. Both good and bad experiences have taught him that being independent from his parents’ supervision can be refreshing, but that it can also have serious consequences.
By witnessing one of the top-tier schools in Singapore, I learned that many of Taiwan’s facilities could be significantly improved on. Even when compared to the National Experimental High School (NEHS) in Hsinchu-Science-Park, which is supposedly one of the best high schools in all of Taiwan, Raffles Institute beats it by a large margin in terms of facilities and equipment for learning. A small example is the fact that the Biology classroom within Raffles Institute provides students with an abundance of clean, new equipment with small, round stationery holders just for the sake of temporarily containing sharp equipment. Meanwhile, the laboratories in NEHS/IBSH lack the described new equipment and, instead, provides old, rusted ones in order to avoid the need to allocate limited funds to buy new ones. There aren’t even the small stationery holders to keep the sharp equipment away from harming students. Even though it is understandable that the limited funding restricts his school’s capability to purchase new equipment annually, but when the international community compares Taiwan’s top schools with the top schools in Singapore, those schools in Singapore will win by quite the margin.
After being intimidated by the competitive atmosphere of Raffles Institute, I learned that he himself also had much to improve on. Although he is doing well academically, he fears how he may compare with the top students in Singapore and in other countries as well. Through the campus tour in Raffles Institute, I earned a new passion and motive to drive himself to become more hardworking and more diligent in school and outside of school. There is an aphorism that says how there is always someone better than you out there, and I would not have been able to completely comprehend and grasp onto this idea without the eye opening experience he gleaned from the visit to Raffles Institute.
I also retrieved some new knowledge from the workshop on St John’s Island and from the classes he attended at NTU. From the workshop, he learned how to properly prepare corals for the effective way of farming that the representatives from the NMMBA showed to the ambassadors and the Singaporeans. This included how to attach fragments of coral to their prospective substrates and how to attach these coral-substrate complexes to a fishing line. At the classes he took at his stay in NTU, I learned more about the importance of different kinds of materials used, such as ice cores extracted from glaciers, coral cores from contemporary and ancient Porites coral, and sediment layers from the seafloor, and how they can provide valuable knowledge that can help scientists today learn more about the past and its atmosphere/environment. These lessons are very valuable to I since they taught him new knowledge that he never would have learned in classes in his high school.
Finally, the most important lesson I learned from this trip to Singapore was how to work with a team of strangers. Although no one was acquainted with one another on a personal level at the beginning, the process that everyone needed to endure highlighted the importance of trusting in one another as a team. It is not easy to completely trust another stranger when completing a task, but it is a must-do when one is placed into the same group with him/her. Working in the same team also requires one to seek the best qualities in each person in order to fully utilize the abilities of each team member to complete the given task at hand. Through this intensive trip, I learned how to see the best and the worst qualities in each teammate and learned how to allocate specific tasks to team members who can excel at completing the assigned tasks with their innate talents. This also leads I to explaining why he decided to trust his leftover funds to Zong-Min Ye and his team. Out of everyone else in the team of ambassadors that visited Singapore, they were the ones who proved themselves worthy of using the funds to, hopefully, starting up a new company in pursuit of entrepreneurship. As stated before, the ultimate goal of this trip was to be inspired by Singapore to start up a new company. In the hands of a high schooler who is only worried about his academics, the funds would go to waste. Since I saw potential in Zong-Min Ye’s team, I thought it was best to achieve this ultimate goal by investing in them, in hopes of them being able to successfully found a company that lives up to the standards of a Singaporean company.
Last, but not least, I would like to thank the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium for allocating funds to the Coral Reef Ambassadors program and for giving the team of ambassadors a chance to seek out the land of competition in Singapore. He would also like to commemorate Dr. Fan for organizing the entire trip and program, for without him, none of this would have been possible in the first place. I wants to also thank the college students and graduate students for all of their care and protection, for they took up that responsibility without us younger students asking them to do so. I congratulates all high school and middle school ambassadors for enduring those two stressful weeks, and he wants to thank them for being there with him and generating all the good times they had in Singapore. I is very grateful and lucky to have met each and every person he met during this trip. Even though there were a lot of bad times fraught with hardships, there were also an abundance of good times that completely outweigh the bad times. Hopefully, the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium will continue funding the Coral Reef Ambassador program and continue creating an opportunity for students to step away from their academics and view the world from a different standpoint.
　

Ethan James Chien
Firstly, I have learned many things from this trip to Singapore. For instance, Singapore is in a really great geological location in relations to the world. Its geological location is in the center of many trade routes. Allowing their harbors and sea trade routes to flourish. Another example is that that they follow the British system of having their driver’s seat on the right hand side of the car and having their cars drive on the left hand side of the roads instead of their right hand side. Similarly, people are expected to stand on the left side of the escalator rather than the right side as we are all familiar with in Taiwan. Moreover, they have four official languages that are all widely used in Singapore. The four languages are English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. In fact, a really unique quality that many Singaporean cashiers, shopkeepers, and retail store owners have is that they can interchange between the four languages. For example, I went to eat dinner at this Indian restaurant one day and I was astonished when I figured that they can speak the four languages interchangeably. Furthermore, I have also learned that Singapore emphasizes on efficiency and cleanliness greatly. Singapore is an extremely efficient country. When we got to Singapore on the first day we had to go through customs and to pick up our luggage, in comparison to the United States (where I spend most of my life in), Singapore’s customs were very assiduous and efficient with their work. In addition, as soon as we finished the customs we went straight to the luggage pick up place. Usually I have to wait ten to twenty minutes in order to find my luggage on the conveyor belt, but in Singapore, as soon as I got there I see my luggage on the conveyor belt circling the place waiting for me. These little first impressions really gave me a good impression of Singapore’s efficiency with things. Anyhow, in general Singapore is a very clean country. They have prolific amounts of public trash cans, it promotes public transits such as public bus, MRT, public biking, and it has laws that prohibit the selling of gum in which can potentially increase littering. I think Taiwan should learn from Singapore with its efficiency and cleanliness. I do understand that the Taiwanese government is trying very hard to improve on these aspects already as shown in major cities like Taipei city, New Taipei city, and Kaohsiung city. I think it’s time to improve the cleanliness and perhaps sanitation of less developed cities and counties. Singapore has been known as the most international country in the Southeast Asia region, and I think with a little bit more of funding and efforts from Taiwan, I believe that Taiwan can be known as the most international country in the East Asia region.
Secondly, I learned many things from the four lectures at NTU. Respectively, I learned: the history and the amazing success that NTU has, the key three steps in order to have a successful business, introduction to basic oceanography, several different methods to do marine ecosystem observation, global warming and its effects on Singapore, Taiwan’s history with tsunamis and landslides, the risk in investing in nuclear power plants in Taiwan, coral cuttings, and understanding history through corals. Hence, I am extremely thankful for the opportunity to sit in four different great professors’ lectures and to pick up this much knowledge and wisdom from them.
Anyhow, from the very beginning of the whole selection process, I was very humbled and honored to be one of the potential team members of this Singapore trip. As I advanced to the final selection workshop, I became extremely nervous because of the fact that there were just so many other well qualified candidates from all over Taiwan competing for the opportunity to go to Singapore. Despite all the pressure and stress that came with the selection process, I had a calm demeanor because I know that even if I was not to be selected, with this many well qualified candidates, the Singapore Coral Reef Ambassador project will still be in good hands. However, when I received the Email from Dr.Fan about the final roster of the Singapore trip team I was captivated and gratified by the fact that I was in the final list. At the moment I couldn’t express my appreciation and excitement I had towards the Coral Reef Ambassador host and organization. As a matter of a fact, even today as I type this report, I am still so grateful and beholden for this opportunity to be in the team. All in all, I would like to show my gratitude and thankfulness towards the organization that hosted this program for hosting the project and believing in me.
I would also like to recognize Dr. Fan’s hard work and knowledge for making this trip so successful and fruitful. Although we faced some hardships and conflicts during the trip, with your guidance and problem-solving skills we successfully conquered all the problems that we have encountered.
Special thanks to Ms. Hsiao for monitoring our financial funds and treating each and one of us like your own kids. I really appreciated her presence and care. Thank you for making this trip possible!
Last but not least, I want to use this opportunity to thank the Taiwanese government for sponsoring us for this trip. Although the Taiwanese government is always overlooked by people, I want to specially thank you guys for making this trip possible. Realistically speaking, without your sponsors and support, this trip can and will never have taken place. Thank you.
　

Yun Jung Tseng
When the author first entered the laboratory on St John’s Island, she was amazed and appalled not by the number of expensive-looking pieces of equipment strategically place around the room, but by the whiteboard that was filled with colorful diagrams and the sheer number of tools that were laid out on the spotless desks awaiting the Taiwanese coral reef ambassadors. The moment they walked into the room, the NTU researcher (Jani Tanzil) and Singaporean phD students sprang into action, explaining with vigor the colorful illustration on the board and instructing them on the details of the experiment they were about to conduct. Throughout the entire three hours, the speakers talked constantly, and there was not a trace of patronizing glances or explanation even though the middle schoolers were a lot younger than they had anticipated.
The author was surprised to see a repetition of the same lack of patronization when they arrived at NTU for three days for morning lectures and afternoon tours. Dorinda Ostermann, one of the researchers who spoke to us about her work with Woods Hole, a prestigious Oceanographic Institution that is extremely well-known, led the Taiwanese through her 100-page powerpoint at an experienced pace that kept things interestingly fresh and still allowed them to learn at the same time. Whenever she talked about her job like how factors such as dust particles in the air affected the climate or even just when she explained what her name “Ostermann” meant, Ostermann would widen her eyes and exclaim passionately “now isn’t that amazing!”
This was the very enthusiasm that made the author realize just how interesting science could be, that it wasn’t just a slew of boring experiments, numbers, and statistics that the science teachers in Taiwan drilled into their students’ minds, but a complex, ever-changing pattern that we would have to learn to interpret like a jigsaw puzzle.
This was the very passion in one’s field of study and the very keenness to pass the knowledge to students that was very rare in Taiwan. It reminded the author of one time when her teacher brought his students to a laboratory in Tsinghua University in Taiwan. The professor didn’t even show up, and instead sent his students to bring everybody around. The students were indeed knowledgeable, but they only touched lightly upon the surface of their work, unwilling to delve into any details and speaking to the middle schoolers in an agonizingly patronizing tone because of their age. This sharp comparison made the author reevaluate just how traditional Taiwan is and how age and dispassionate teachers were an impediment to many advances in research or technology that the country could have made but didn’t because not enough people had been intrigued by their teachers when they were still in school to be motivated to chase after their dreams. Another interesting aspect of Singapore is its cultural diversity. There were just so many different types of people there that the author will elaborate on only one: the Muslims. Halal, or meat prepared as prescribed by Muslim law, was one thing that the coral reef ambassadors were told to keep in mind when buying food for their stay on St John’s Island, which had mainly Muslim staff members. Not only were the Taiwanese not allowed to bring pork products onto the island, they were also prohibited from using kitchenware hat had “HALAL” scrawled across it. When somebody from the team accidentally cooked spaghetti with the wrong pot, she was told to purify it by washing it at a holy well with a holy sponge. It was only then did they realize just how seriously some people took religion and just how much everybody should respect that.
It’s easy to say “I respect all cultures and beliefs” when one isn’t surrounded by any different cultures or a diversity of races like in Taiwan, but not so much when it’s all around said person and requires him/her to do a little extra thinking before he/she acts. From the large number of hijabs on the streets to the “Return Plates—Halal” signs that were on all half of the racks in all the food courts, a vast array of cultures and beliefs that can be seen in Singapore, along with respect for said beliefs and cultures. And maybe it is this diversity of thoughts that make Singapore one of the most advanced countries in the world, and the author is incredibly honored to have been given the opportunity to experience what life is like in such a diverse yet flexible country.

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