College can be a jungle with very welcoming tribes

I REFER to the letter published in YouthInk on Dec 1: 'It's a jungle out there.'

It is unfortunate that the author, Mr Eisen Teo, had a negative social experience at Raffles Junior College (RJC). He says it is much easier to be accepted in RJC if you are from Raffles Institution (RI) or Raffles Girls School (RGS). After all, it means that you have friends and acquaintances, and you are entrenched in the co-curricular activity network, a ready-made support base.

Yet this is far from the whole story, and to say that RJC is a 'jungle' of exclusive 'tribes' is to do Rafflesians a great disservice.

In Mr Teo's time, two-thirds of RJC students would probably have come from RI or RGS. With the advent of the Integrated Programme, three-quarters of my cohort - which entered junior college last year - were probably from RI or RGS.

We were transplanted practically wholesale into RJC because virtually the whole of RI or RGS managed to get in. If anything, it should be harder for people from other schools to fit in now.

Mr Teo said he knew no one in RJC, and that his friends had gone to other schools.

In my case, I knew no one in Singapore, as I had been educated in Europe for nine years. If anyone was an outsider, it was me, and it was intimidating to stand there on the first day of orientation, afloat in a sea of white shirts and blue pinafores.

And yet, even with these 'tribes' in place, my experience in RJC has been one of inclusion and friendship. I was deposited into a wonderful class with whom I am great friends. I was even elected the civics representative, and our friendship extends beyond school hours. I joined the Raffles Debaters and was elected vice-chairman. I even managed to get into the school delegation to Pre- University Seminar 2007, and began making friends in the Science stream.

Titles do not signify social acceptance. But these are indicators of the regard and friendship with which we outsiders are treated in RJC.

So before we bemoan the fact that 'life is a jungle of tribes', let us ask ourselves whether those tribes are really exclusive, or whether we simply did not make the effort to go beyond staring at each other in mute incomprehension and clinging to the stale familiarity of the past.

Alexander Woon, 18, is a former humanities student at Raffles Junior College.