To be fair, the misconception is understandable. At 5’2”, the petite senior has no trouble staying below the 110-pound weight limit required of her as a coxswain for the Amherst women’s crew team. Tan has a soft voice that squeals a little bit when she gets excited, and she is obsessed with rainbow paraphernalia—she occasionally refers to herself as “Princess Rainbow Juliet Tan.” She usually dresses in large hooded sweatshirts, tiny shorts and flip-flops, regardless of the temperature outside. And according to friend Emmy Smith ’08, Tan “develops huge, long-lasting crushes on big burly men that she doesn’t know.”
Tan may occasionally be silly, but she is by no means naïve. “She’s one of the wisest people that I know,” said Atwell-McLeod. “She has an incredible ability to understand people, to see through fakeness, but also to look for good. And I think her perceptiveness is what makes her such an incredible friend, an amazing student, and what will make her a wonderful doctor.”
Medicine to Anthro,
and Back
The story of how Tan became an anthropology major and future physician is a complicated one. Tan pursued a pre-med path at her high school in her native Singapore. Upon coming to Amherst, however, she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue with medicine. In her first year, she enrolled in a wide range of liberal arts classes in an effort to find her true calling. She also continued to take a few pre-med courses, including math, which she added as a fifth class for her first semester. It went well, so she stuck with both math and the five-class schedule for most of her Amherst career. She has taken five classes every semester except two, and she eventually declared math as part of a double major.
The other half of the double major was anthropology, which Tan fell in love with as a first-year in Chair of Anthropology and Sociology Deborah Gewertz’s class, Contemporary Topics in Anthropology. “All of the topics were really interesting to me, and she taught it really well,” recalled Tan. Gewertz, now Tan’s academic advisor, expresses an equal fondness of Tan’s work in the class. “She wrote essays to die for in their combination of careful logic and passionate argument,” she said.
Eventually, Tan’s affection for anthropology took over her academic life. She dropped the math major and largely abandoned the pre-med track. Instead, she continued with anthropology and began to take Russian language courses so that she could go abroad and study Siberian nomadic culture. She liked Russian so much that she decided to pick up another language, Spanish. Though she will graduate with the ability to speak four languages (she grew up speaking both Chinese and English), Tan said, “My one regret about Amherst is that I didn’t take more language classes.”
For the second semester of her junior year, she applied to an anthropology study abroad program in Russian Siberia, where she hoped to live with nomadic reindeer herders. Friends were predictably skeptical. “It’s really crazy,” said Atwell-McLeod, “except it’s not that crazy if you know Juliet.”
Tan was admitted to the program and was one of only six students to accept the invitation. She spent the semester in Russia, culminating in a month embedded with a family of Siberian nomads. “It was very abstract in my head until I actually went there,” Tan said. Getting there involved two days split among an airplane, a train, a bus, a van and finally a tractor. “After I hopped off the tractor, I met my host family, and the lady who had brought me said, ‘OK, we’ll see you in a month.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit! What am I going to do for a month?’”
What she did was live the daily life of a Siberian reindeer herder which, she said, entailed tending to animals, talking to people, eating five times a day and drinking copious amounts of vodka. Fortunately, she got along well with her host family and enjoyed what she called a “slow” lifestyle. “It was like a holiday for me.”
When she returned to campus, Tan began work on an honors thesis describing her experience in Siberia and the history of the people with whom she had stayed. The thesis eventually earned Tan a nomination for Magna Cum Laude honors, and won her the Donald S. Pitkin Prize for the anthropology or sociology thesis that “best exemplifies the humane values to which Professor Pitkin committed his research and teaching.”
Tan considered a career in anthropology, but decided “on a whim” to apply to a new medical school that Duke University had opened in Singapore, not expecting to gain admittance. “I was flat-out surprised,” recounted Tan, “I didn’t think I would get in. I was torn because throughout my whole senior year I had been doing a lot of research for my thesis and more and more I started getting into [the idea of] going into anthropology for the next few years.” She added, “I knew I could be an OK doctor, but I always wondered if I could be a better anthropologist.”
When asked why she ultimately chose medicine over anthropology, she responded, “That’s a complicated issue, but I guess I would say it was too good an opportunity to pass up … With a degree from this school, I’ll be able to work in Asia and I’ll be able to work in America, and having that sort of flexibility really appeals to me.”
A Well-Traveled Woman
Given the breadth of locations she has made a home in thus far, geographical flexibility may just be the most appropriate rationale for Tan’s career choice—Tan has visited or lived in 20 different states and 27 different countries.
One of these was Spain, where, during the summer between her sophomore and junior years, Tan and several members of Educate! spent a month raising money by backpacking 500 miles through the north of the country, on the famous pilgrimage to Santiago. They were in Spain during the World Cup Final between France and Italy, an occasion that, according to Smith, brought out Tan’s enthusiasm for other countries, new people and new experiences. For the soccer game, the group crowded into a bar with several Europeans (including many Italians) with whom they had been travelling. When Italy won, they all decided to embark on a night hike to celebrate, but quickly tired and collapsed in a wheat field. At that point, recalled Smith, “Juliet [stood] in the middle of the circle of about 15 students and young adults from all over the world and [insisted] that we all sing our country’s national anthem. She starts off by belting out the Singaporean national anthem and then [demanded] to hear Italy’s, Denmark’s, Spain’s, Belgium’s and America’s.”
Earlier that summer, Tan had spent two weeks in Mongolia, camping in the desert with her mother and a few other Singaporeans. It was there that she first discovered her passion for Siberia and its nomadic peoples. “If you know Jewlz, you know that she has a passion for nomads,” said Smith, “Mongolian nomads in particular.” In fact, Tan said that she chose to take Russian and go abroad to Siberia only after she learned that the Five Colleges didn’t offer classes in Mongolian and there was no decent study abroad program in Mongolia.
Last summer, Tan spent a month teaching English to adults in the Czech Republic. Since she didn’t know anyone, she spent a lot of time with the other teachers. “That was a good experience,” she said, “because all those people had crazy lives … Meeting all these crazy people gave me a lot of courage that it wouldn’t be bad to do crazy things.”
In fact, unique diversity of geographic experience has been part of Tan’s life since the outset. Born in Singapore, she grew up with her parents and younger sister. Her father is a banker-turned-professional gambler who once sought advice from an astrologer on a mountain in Malaysia. The only time Tan’s father has ever discussed grades with her, she said, was to express disappointment at an A minus she received—in probability. He frequently takes the family to Las Vegas, where Tan participates in an annual bowling game with a local boy she met in a shoe store (she wins every year).
Though she is close with both of her parents, Tan sees more of her mother Lily because her father travels so much. “My mom’s the nicest person alive,” said Tan. They often run together, because Lilly loves to run and Juliet loves to be with her. Every August, they run the Singapore Army Half-Marathon. When asked if the marathon is difficult since she doesn’t do much running at Amherst, Tan exclaimed, “Yeah, the last five kilometers are killer,” then after a hesitation, added, “mainly because sometimes they run out of bananas.”
Tan was heavily involved in the Girl Scouts as a child, earning the highest possible rank at age 16. Consistent with her ongoing passion for other cultures, Tan’s favorite aspect of scouting was the pen pal program. Even now, a wall of her dorm room is covered with postcards from around the world. She conceives of these places based on her fellow scouts’ letters. Ask her about Death Valley, for example, and you will receive a response not about the lowest elevation in North America, but about how Tan’s pen pal, Kelly, lived there and enjoyed roller skating.
An Accomplished Cox
Ever eager to try new things, Tan made crew her sport of choice at Amherst, becoming a coxswain, whose primary job is to navigate the boat. She has had a prolific four-year career with the crew team (a rare feat in itself, according to Head Coach Bill Stekl), culminating this year, when she won the Iron Lung Award that goes to the best coxswain at Amherst.
After she was shunned during her first year by a coach who, Tan said, “didn’t like quiet coxswains,” Assistant Coach Dave Thomas moved Tan to the men’s team for her sophomore year. It was a smart move on Thomas’s part. With the men, Tan coxed for a heavyweight four-person boat that won a gold medal at the New England Championships and led the men’s team to the points title there.
She stayed with the same boat in the fall of junior year, but went abroad for the spring, which was when New England Championships were held. By fall of 2007, all four of those rowers had graduated, so for her senior year, Tan returned to the women’s team, for which she coxed New England’s top-ranked women’s lightweight four-person boat. She said that boat could have earned another gold medal at New Englands if it had stayed together, but the coaches decided there was not enough competition in that division and shuffled in rowers from other boats to move it up to heavyweight. Against stiffer competition, the women took silver at New Englands, helping Amherst to the overall points title.
“We have never had successful boats without winning coxswains,” says Stekl. “Juliet is a champion and will always be a champion.” Thomas echoes those sentiments: “She will be missed next year, because people with the entire package do not come around every year.”
Crossing Borders
Tan learned about Amherst when she saw a picture of her favorite photographer, Dan Eldon, wearing an Amherst T-shirt. “I was like, ‘Huh, what does that mean?’ so I Googled it. When I saw what it was, I figured if Dan Eldon was inspired by being at Amherst, I wanted to see this place for myself.” Two years later she applied, unaware that Eldon had not attended Amherst.
Her decision seemed strange to people in Singapore, where education is stricter and more specialized. But, for someone as intellectually curious as Tan, it proved to be a very wise choice. Indeed, partially based on the example set by students like Tan, Singapore is exploring incorporating some aspects of the Amherst experience into its own educational system. A few months ago, Singapore’s Minister of Education, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, brought a delegation to Amherst to investigate the American tradition of liberal arts colleges. Tan and other Singaporean students at the College had breakfast with him and fielded questions. If anyone was in a position to explain to the delegation the value of a liberal arts program like Amherst’s, it was Tan. “I tried to explain to him that it didn’t have to lead to anything,” she says. “It was all about experiencing the world and interacting with a bunch of people.”