First-Year Writing Competition

The Most Authentic Student Voices: A First-Year Writing Competition

In 2023, CEC launched the "Most Authentic Student Voices" competition to celebrate the best student writing about issues that matter the most to our youths.

The competition aims to encourage students to explore and articulate their concerns more critically and passionately so they can be the authentic voices for the change they want to see happening in their world.

Winner are selected from a shortlist of entries submitted by the instructors of the Writing & Reasoning module.

These are the winners of AY2025-26 Term 2, who impressed us with their originality, creativity, and clarity of expression:

● First Prize: Sharifah Aliyah Binte Syed Agil for "We’ve Lost the Plot! When Reading Becomes Performance Not Practice"

● Second Prize: Murugan Lokesh for "Situationships: Has Gen Z ruined dating?"

● Third Prize: Tan Ethan for "Charlie Kirk isn’t Really Dead: The Memeification of Visceral Media"

● Merit award: Foo Qi Hong Ledric for "The “Optimisation Paralysis” and Why the Best Action to Take Is to Start"

● Merit award: Diya Mithra Gopalakrishnan for "My Accent Has Me Tongue-Tied"

Here are the winning essays.