Advancement And Alumni

Before I took on the advancement portfolio officially in 2008, I did a six-month interim in 2004 while they were searching for the director for advancement. That was interesting because I went right smack without advancement experience then right smack into the stewardship of the biggest gift to SMU then. It was the stewardship of that landmark gift, $50-million gift from the Lee Foundation. It was then the largest private gift to a university [in Singapore]. With the government match of $150 million, it became a $200-million gift which makes it one of the biggest gifts internationally, I think, to a university. So we did a lot of things in term of stewardship. We actually produced a CNA [Channel NewsAsia] documentary on Lee Kong Chian. And so I had to go and interview his family members, friends who knew him then, and pull together the research together with the CNA producer which was also good because we were able to capture then on the website the life of this man, who has the foresight to set up the Lee Foundation and to support education in such a big way. Also part of that, not everybody's aware, it was also the first naming of a school in the local universities, because there wasn't any naming of a school then, so the Lee Kong Chian business school was the first school to be named in the local universities.