Describe two or three of your current intellectual interests and why they are exciting to you. Why will Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences be the right environment in which to pursue your interests? (Please limit your response to 650 words.)
To say it is a current intellectual interest is a misnomer. It is not current and neither is it an interest. It is not a fleeting curiosity, but a ceaseless passion. This it refers to the financial market. You may think that it is quite a statement to proclaim but let me explain.
To say it is a ceaseless passion would imply an alignment of certain inherency between the financial market and I. Therefore, this warrants an inspection into both.
I know I am a thinking being. As a thinking being, I must think, if not, I cease to exist (in the larger sense). Therefore, I must engage in an activity that requires constant thinking for survival as my non-existence would count towards my "death". As a person who has deal with the financial market for 7 years and experienced the crash of 2008, I would say, the financial market is this activity. It is competitive, dynamic, intellectual and existential. The closest analogy of such is The Hunger Games, but instead of using one's fighting skills, one uses one's brain for survival. While it is impossible for you, the reader, to understand my feeling when a thesis finally played out...I would say the closest word is...orgasmic. It is just indescribably extraordinary.
While this may all seem too... mystical, this is why I revel in the financial market. However, my teachers and friends thought I was mad when I told them this ideology. Granted that might be true in certain respect, in my opinion, this "madness" is my differing factor. It is what makes me unique, it un-commoditize me.
Another attribute of the successful financier is a thirst to gain an understanding of the world. This is because only by doing so, can one see the cogs of the globe and identify potential opportunities. Coincidentally, this thirst is shared by another breed of people called the philosophers. I believe this to be the reason as to how quickly I got absorbed into the world of philosophy as soon as I became aware of it and I have yet to stop since.
One of my most recent philosophical interests is the World Structure by Peter Thiel. It is a structure where ideas can be categorized into a 2x2 matrix: Determinate/Indeterminate - Optimistic/Pessimistic. It underlies the drivers behind culture which is in turn the driver for many other things. It really unveils the "fog of war" and puts the world in a more understandable state. This is an exciting frontier to explore as it assigns a central significance to a specific context, be it philosophy, culture or anything social. This is something much unexplored since Hegelian historicism and to be able to study philosophy and potentially grow this idea is particularly exciting.
Why Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) is thus a simple question. I want to study Philosophy and Economics in order to further my works in both, to become a better financier and to work on Peter Thiel's World Structure. The more important question however is why Cornell?
Unlike my country, Singapore, which lies in the Indeterminate-Pessimistic matrix, Cornell, in my opinion lies deeply in the Determinate-Optimistic matrix, where failure is seen as a step towards eventual success. It encourages creativity and the explorative and innovative spirit to run free. It does not discriminate in terms of education choices. It understands that the inherent mental processes from a seemingly irrelevant education such as philosophy is valuable, no matter in what cost-benefit analysis, as the process can be applied in any situations. It is only in such an environment can one's intellectual faculty expand. It is only in such an environment can bold new frontier be explore. It is only in such an environment, can one learn.
Cornell's motto more than sum ups my thoughts: I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.
