In 2015, Accountancy and Business Year 3 student Woon Yeow and History Year 2 student Debra co-wrote a policy paper on cyber-security and had it presented to government officials. They were participating the Lead Asia-Pacific Program (LAP), a three-stage programme that allows youth delegates to learn about policy development, write a policy paper and present it to government officials.
LAP is organised by the Asia-Pacific Youth Organisation (APYO), a student-run, not-for-profit organisation that aims to bring young leaders and governments of the Asia-Pacific region closer together in the areas of economic and foreign policy.
The programme spanned three months, from August to November in 2015. To fit their schedules, Woon Yeow and Debra paired up to participate in LAP. While the pair worked on their policy paper together, Woon Yeow attended the first part of the programme to learn about policy development and Debra attended the second part to present their paper. Read on to hear about Woon Yeow’s experience.
By Tay Woon Yeow
A group photo of the APYO delegates and staff in front of the Office of The Prime Minister, Putrajaya, Malaysia
APYO was introduced to me by Joash (a Year 4 Economics student), a senior one year above me in USP, who attended its conference previously. He was passionate about it and managed to build a team working on subsequent APYO outreach and programmes. I was convinced that it would be a good platform for me to meet interesting people, develop a more global outlook and expose myself to new ideas. That’s why I participated as a delegate in 2015.
To fit my schedule, the APYO team paired me up Debra (a Year 2 student from History) for the 2015 programme, which was split into 3 phases. That made it possible for me to attend phase 1 (the APYO retreat), work on phase 2 with Debra (writing of the policy paper) and then have Debra attend the 3rd phase (main event).
In Phase 1, a series of workshops and fieldtrips was put together. Over a course of five days, I met and befriended 27 delegates from 11 participating countries. The workshops focused on helping delegates develop a broad understanding of the development of policy issues and trends within the region. Delegates were also offered the rare opportunity to interact with former and current government officials, in both formal and informal settings. In particular, I enjoyed the session on policy writing and communication. I also found the session on opinion editorials given by a fellow delegate useful.
For Phase 2, I’m glad that I got to work with Debra because even though we came from different backgrounds, we were able to pool together knowledge from different faculties in formulating our policy paper. The interdisciplinary collaboration also made the process, from the idea generation to the writing of the policy paper, particularly interesting for me. This ties in very well with what USP stands for and I definitely recommend USP juniors to participate in future APYO events.
Click here to read about Debra’s experience.
