The essential character of college life lies not in the attention we pay to the needs of the body, important though those are, but also the sense of a group of friends and classmates who learn together and who teach one another. This is what social scientists call the peer effect, and it is something that professors sometimes neglect to acknowledge, mainly that in the right circumstances and in the right environment students learn as much from their interactions with one another, whether that’s in team sports, in clubs and societies, or just over tea and a snack in the afternoon or the evening, as they do from their formal coursework. And the model of a community of learning draws on this peer effect and on what students can learn from being in close proximity with each other and with their professors.

Residential living at Yale-NUS means I can count on having company, whatever the time of day, wherever I seek it: in the dining hall, the common lounges, the laundry room, even on corridor floors. My friendships formed outside of class carry into it, and our learning is never confined to seminars.

Studies have found that there is a particularly strong learning experience available to students who share a community with people from a different background or from a different country, and this significantly improves the learning of a typical undergraduate. Friendships formed with people unlike oneself blossom later in life into a cosmopolitan attitude which can be taught much more effectively through informal contacts than through formal lectures on tolerance.

People always say that you learn more from your classmates in college than you do your professors, and now I fully appreciate just how much there is to learn from being part of such a diverse group. Stories and experiences are not delivered on a one-way street; everyone views the same events differently, which contributes to a more comprehensive understanding.