Joel Tan gets his biology chance

The opening

Apply once when the door is real

Joel Tan loved biology but was steered away from it in Singapore’s school system. After military service and rejected university applications, he chose one overseas application to U of T, treating the top-ranked Canadian school as a long shot.

The decision was economical as well as ambitious: one fee, one chance, one possibility that his previous grades did not tell the whole story.

The bridge

Let a campus reveal the work

At U of T, Tan took his first biology class, joined laboratory work and found professors willing to involve him in research as an undergraduate. Mentors and peers helped him see a path from an Arts & Science degree to the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and a doctorate at Harvard.

The change was not a miracle conversion. It was access: to equipment, questions, time and people who could recognise effort before it looked like a finished record.

The return

Make opportunity a practice

Tan’s biomedical research and mentoring now sit alongside the story of how he entered the field. As a 2026 Schmidt Science Fellow, he plans to work at the intersection of computational biology and neurodegeneration, while hoping to return to Canada to build a lab.

His path gives alumni a durable test for opportunity: who gets a first chance, who gets a second conversation and what support makes it possible to pass the opening along.