Running The Professorial Marathon, Taking Risks Along The Way: A Profile of Professor Bernard Tan

Formative Years

Bernard was born in Singapore in 1964. He attended St Anthony’s Boys School, then St Joseph’s Institution to study for the ‘O’-Level examinations, and Catholic Junior College for the ‘A’-Level examinations. In those days, Bernard recalls fondly, the three schools had an easy-going culture, not what one might describe as competitive or academically challenging. His junior college, for instance, had such low expectations of his performance that his teacher congratulated him when he received just over 50 out of 100 marks for his first physics test. His parents, Chinese-educated up to secondary school level, took a relaxed view of his education and also did not put very much pressure on him. Unburdened by any strong ambition or expectation of success, Bernard naturally found school-life to be great fun.

Reflection 1: Were you academically inclined as a young student? What sort of encouragement did you receive from the schools you attended and from your family? Before attending university, did you ever think you would become an academic?

In 1985, Bernard was admitted to the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Science. Although he did not have as strong an academic foundation as his peers who had studied at top junior colleges, he did not feel disadvantaged and, in fact, continued to enjoy a mostly carefree life on campus. Like most other male Singaporean freshmen, he experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom having just completed 2½ years of mandatory military service, or ‘National Service’. Campus life offered many opportunities for having fun. And in his first two years at the university, Bernard never missed a ‘jam and hop’, the highlight of social life for the NUS student body.

Reflection 2: What was your own experience of campus life as a university student? Do you reflect on those experiences to understand the psychology of your students today? If so, has it helped you in your teaching?

Amidst all this fun, Bernard did not neglect his studies. As a student in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS), he took courses from a common curriculum in the first year and, based on his firstyear results, was subsequently streamed into computer science. As he wanted to pursue his studies in an interdisciplinary programme (there were very few in those days), Bernard appealed to the Head of Department to switch to information systems (IS). His appeal was granted.

Reflection 3: What advice would you generally give to students who want to switch courses?

It was while taking courses in IS that he met Professor KS Raman, who would later have an important influence on his career. As a teacher, Raman was very traditional. He did not supply his students with notes, but expected them to make their own notes from his lectures.

Reflection 4: In today’s classroom, there are many presentation technologies available for teaching and learning, including the very popular and often abused PowerPoint slides. In your experience as a student and teacher, what have you observed to be some of the worst and best examples of how presentation technology has been used in the classroom? What should we make of ‘traditional’ methods of teaching that are unassisted by IT in today’s classroom?

In his Honours year, when DISCS students were required to do a final-year project that had a research component, Bernard was assigned to Raman for supervision.

Reflection 5: How is the Honours thesis or project supervision carried out in your department? Is there a need for improvement?

During this time, Bernard started to think more seriously about his future career and applied for jobs at Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS). He was also offered a job at the Central Provident Fund Board in Singapore, where he had done an internship.

Reflection 6: As a student, did you ever do an internship? If so, what impact did it have on your career choice and prospects? Do you now encourage your students to do an internship? Do you have any success and horror stories to share?

Raman, however, encouraged him to go into research. Up to this point, Bernard had never considered becoming an academic, and certainly not one at NUS. Raman’s justification for this advice was rather unexpected: Observing that Bernard did not perform as well in IS courses compared to other courses, Raman argued, perhaps in jest, that Bernard should continue studying IS to improve his mastery of the subject. More importantly, Raman was able to convince Bernard that he had the potential to do very good research in IS. Bernard took his advice, enrolled as a Masters student, and ended up as his research assistant (RA) in 1989. Many years later, when he won the NUS Young Researcher Award in 2002, Bernard made it a point to thank Raman, who – in turn – admitted to him, light-heartedly, that he had asked Bernard to continue his studies simply because he needed an RA at the time and Bernard seemed to be able to do the job. Raman’s advice, regardless of his initial motivations, had nevertheless given him enough confidence at the time to pursue research seriously.

Reflection 7: Did you have an advisor or a mentor who encouraged you to become an academic? If so, what was the most convincing thing that they said to you?

As Raman’s RA, Bernard found himself working within an interdisciplinary environment. He visited many different libraries in the university to collect materials and became so immersed in the job that he was able to memorize the call numbers of most of the key journals. More importantly, he learnt how to evaluate the quality of sources.

Before too long, Bernard was able to submit a few articles that were accepted and published in leading journals, which was at the time rather uncommon for a graduate student at NUS. He was also able to get his Masters thesis on group support systems published.

Reflection 9: Are graduate students in your department encouraged to present papers at conferences and to publish in high quality journals? If so, what kind of support do they have for doing this? What more should be done to prepare them for academic careers?

From his own experience, Bernard today fully appreciates the importance of giving opportunities to students who are hardworking and willing to learn, even if they may not appear to be able to produce outstanding results in the first instance. Associate Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli, once a Ph.D. student under Bernard’s supervision and now a colleague, describes Bernard as an ‘excellent mentor’. A key lesson she learnt was the need to analyze one’s own work critically. Whenever we were writing up our research work for publication, he would always encourage me to make sure that the arguments presented are robust and foolproof such that no one (including reviewers) can poke holes in it.

She recalls how Bernard was always advising her to build up my skills one step at a time and challenge myself to progress further. He takes a keen interest in the career development of his students. One specific example is in the area of professional service and reviewing where I progressed from reviewing conference to journal papers, to Associate Editor, Track Chair, and Senior Editor roles. In general, I have benefited from observing the way he planned his own career as he serves as a great role model.

Jason Chan, currently a doctoral student in the Department of Information, Operations, Management Sciences (IOMS) at Stern School of Business, New York University, wrote an undergraduate final-year thesis under Bernard’s supervision in 2007 to 2008, and then worked as his research assistant from 2008 to 2009. During this time, they managed to do further research on the thesis and to co-publish it. Jason describes Bernard as ‘a wonderful person to work with’ and as someone who ‘has played an important role in shaping who I am today’. He elaborates:

Reflection 10: Have you ever been approached by students looking for guidance in pursuing academic careers? If so, what sort of assistance have you offered? More generally, do you offer informal career guidance to your students? Any success stories to share?

Bernard believes he was fortunate to have come under Raman’s positive influence. The professor was an active researcher at a time when NUS did not focus very much on research. Even though the university did not require it, Raman strongly believed in the value of doing good research. Most faculty at NUS in the 1980s and 1990s were doing small-scale research, publishing their work in what would today be considered less prestigious ‘tier 3’ and ‘tier 4’ journals. Raman looked for big projects. Courageously and often shamelessly, he approached universities in the United States to secure collaboration. Undaunted by the many unsuccessful attempts, he eventually succeeded in finding a partner at the University of Minnesota. Persistence paid off. When Bernard was contemplating his Ph.D. studies, he was advised to do it at NUS because the university was starting to build up its graduate programmes. Naturally, there were, at the time, insufficient courses to make up a strong Ph.D. curriculum.

Reflection 11: What are the principles that guide curriculum design in your department’s Ph.D. programme? Are there aspects of this that can be improved?

To make up for the inadequacies, NUS departments would sometimes send their graduate students, on an ad hoc basis, to partner universities overseas that offered relevant courses. In 1992, Bernard was sent to the University of Georgia in the US, an opportunity that he today considers to be an intellectual turning point in his life, since it was there that his interdisciplinary horizons were broadened. The coursework at Georgia was of high quality; though, compared to NUS, it was not as well structured and integrated. The university had a very collegial atmosphere and information was freely and widely shared. There was a lot of contact between students and professors, not least during the regular Friday drinking sessions that had become an institution.

Reflection 12: How important is it for professors to cultivate an informal relationship with students outside of the classroom? What are some of the pros and cons of doing this? Any good practices to share?

The students were fun loving. The university itself was very respectable. Its professors were good scholars working in an intensive research environment. Bernard volunteered to conduct research experiments for his professors and was able to develop his skills in experiment design. By this time, he was quite sure that he wanted to be an academic. Under the supervision of Professor Richard Watson, he worked on a cross-cultural study on groupware (collaborative software designed to support groups of people engaged in a common activity to achieve common goals). While professors from other US universities, whom Bernard met at conferences, cautioned him against working on a cross-cultural topic that would be difficult to publish in top journals whose reviewers were mostly American, Watson – to his great credit – advised Bernard to be bold and advance his research in the confidence that it would produce valuable results that challenged conventional wisdom. Only by such acts of boldness and persistence can the field move forward. Indeed, in spite of a very difficult and lengthy review process, the study was eventually published in a leading journal. Bernard learnt from this experience that knowledge is socially constructed. Ideas that are not normally well received at first by a dominant community of scholars may find acceptance and even gain prestige if argued well. Any good paper, he believes, will find its home. But one has to be open and adaptive to disciplinary differences and persistent enough in finding this home.

Over the years, Watson has encouraged all his doctoral students to take the less chosen path because:

Today, Watson recalls that, when Bernard arrived at the University of Georgia, it was quickly clear that he was highly intelligent and motivated; but, above all, Bernard was someone you immediately liked and admired. He notes, ‘Not surprisingly, as a reflective and conscientious student, Bernard considered my advice, and I know that boldness and perseverance have been valuable allies in his career’.

Reflection 13: Have you experienced a similar problem of attempting innovative and potentially vital work that no leading journal seems to want to publish? If so, how have you dealt with it? What impact has it had on your research agenda? And what advice would you give anyone thinking of working on unorthodox questions at an earlier stage in their career?

After successfully completing his Ph.D., Bernard was selected by his department for a one-year post-doctoral position at Stanford Business School in 1996. He remembers the stint as being very challenging. He had to work very hard, for instance, to produce teaching cases out of research results pertaining to the IT industry. His goal was to learn as much from the experience as possible. He was also able to work on several journal articles during the time. While he was engaged in research work at the business school, he also managed to approach the Stanford Engineering School to secure a teaching collaboration with his department at NUS. It was, by all accounts, a productive year.