Commencement Speech 2026
Speech by Er Aaron Foong, Senior Executive Director at Surbana Jurong Group, at the NUS Commencement 2025 Ceremony (C18) for Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduation on Wednesday, 15 July 2025 at 10.00am.
Professor Teo Kie Leong, Dean, College of Design and Engineering;
Distinguished Guests, Graduates, Parents, and Friends;
Ladies and Gentlemen
Good morning. Congratulations.
Today, we celebrate not only what you have achieved, but who you have become.
More than twenty years ago, if you'd asked me which moments would one day define my career, I would have gotten the answer wrong. Completely wrong.
Because the moments that mattered most weren't the ones anyone applauded. They were the ones that made me question whether to keep going at all. Let me share two of them today.
Twenty-five years ago, as the Chairperson of NUS Hall Rag & Flag, I thought leadership meant having a foolproof plan and all the answers.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
We hit bottlenecks at every turn.
Manpower descended into chaos. Props refused to fit together.
And every time something went wrong, my instinct was to grip tighter.
I thought that was leadership.
I became consumed by one goal – to win. Looking back, that obsession became my biggest liability.
Eventually, I had to admit something I had been resisting all along: the grip was the problem, not the solution.
The project only began to move forward on the day I stood before my team and said humbly the one sentence I'd been avoiding for weeks: "I don't know what to do."
That's when I discovered something unexpected: the best advice did not come from the people I expected.
An alumnus who had led the project a decade earlier.
A mechanic with tricks on how to distribute weight and sequence the mechanisms.
A textile supplier who looked at our budget, then at our ambitions, and said, not unkindly, "You want bespoke tailoring, but you've only brought me off-the-rack money.”
He wasn't wrong.
We didn't win that day.
But I learned something far more valuable: Confidence helps you solve problems. Certainty stops you from seeing them.
That's the strange thing about education.
At university, you learn the lesson before you sit the test. Most questions have the right answer.
Life reverses the order.
It gives you the test first. The lesson only arrives after and if you're paying attention.
So, wherever life takes you, don't feel you need to have all the answers.
Stay curious. Stay teachable.
Trust me - this is a cheaper way to learn.
Years later, life handed me another test. This one came without warning. I stood in the basement of the former Paramount Hotel Front block, right after a fire had torn through it for five straight hours, way above the two-hour fire rating for structures.
I was the Qualified Person responsible for the design and certification of structural safety. The walls were still hot. Outside, Marine Parade roofs were dusted with black soot.
Everyone wanted something urgently from me that day.
The authorities wanted a clear finding. The press wanted a headline. The insurer wanted to know the cost of repair. Hotel management wanted it to reopen.
Outside, displaced guests were not thinking about structural loads. They wanted their passports. Their medicine. The one bag they couldn't leave behind.
I recall standing there and realising, with something close to vertigo, that the building had stopped being a building. It was somebody's life, temporarily made of concrete.
The easiest decision would have been to make no decision at all i.e. to keep the building closed until every uncertainty had disappeared.
I made the call to open the building while essential stabilisation works continued.
It wasn't the easiest decision. Neither was it the most comfortable one.
The calculations told me what was possible.
Judgement determined what was responsible.
University taught me how structures behave under load.
Life taught me how people do.
It took me years to realise those weren't two different stories. They were the same lesson, told twice. The first taught me that humility widens your perspective, and second, that perspective deepens your judgement.
The judgment to balance competing realities and the courage to carry
responsibility for others.
That's the real work before you now, Class of 2026.
Whether you build structures, companies, communities, or relationships - Build well.
Because one day someone you have never met will place their trust in something you built.
Structures carry loads.
Go and carry people.