Curiosity is Everything: An interview with USP Alum Pearl Maria Forss
By Augustin Chiam
Augustin (Political Science + USP, Year 3) is a student writer for Highlights.
Reporting was something that Pearl Maria Forss (Sociology + USP, Class of 2004) had always wanted to do since she was 17. The University Scholars Programme (USP) alumna described how her curiosity for the world was nurtured, first as a debater, then through the courses in USP and later, working as a reporter. She is currently Senior Producer (Current Affairs) for Channel NewsAsia.
Given her passion in journalism, one would have thought that she would be heavily involved in campus journalism whilst at NUS. However, Forss is more known for her role in setting up the University Scholars Club (USC) and as the founding president of the USC. It was a role that involved writing the constitution, writing marketing plans, trying to get sponsorship, planning overseas excursions – skills that also helped her in her career.
She also credits her time in USP for developing her ‘critical thinking’ skills, which she defines as the ability to make sense of things, to deconstruct questions, to make inter-disciplinary links, the antithesis of rote learning.
“Back when I was in school, there was still quite a lot of rote learning – the ability to memorise theories and spill them out over a two hour examination. So what I really love about the USP courses was that there were (almost) no exams!”
In previous interviews, she has specifically highlighted Prof. George Landow 1 ’s “Telling Stories in Cyberspace” as a module offered in USP at that time, which transformed the way she perceived the stories and information disseminated on the Internet. Now that she has worked in the media industry for a number of years since graduation, her views have evolved. She describes how in the media industry, there is often a limited amount of time allocated for each story and it is impossible to cover all elements and angles of the story.
“As a practitioner, our job is to synthesise (all the information available) and be as responsible as we can possibly be.”
From her early days as a news reporter, she has gone on to produce long-form documentaries about topics such as human trafficking. Her preferred topic of choice is poverty and the wide-ranging consequences of poverty in our world today.
“Call me idealistic but … one of the roles of the media is to expose injustice and to hold some people accountable.”
Holding people accountable can be a risky venture but she “does not consider them challenges.” Some of these projects can be dangerous. She recounts how she had to avoid the thugs in Cambodia while filming a story on human trafficking and how civil war broke out in Kyrgyzstan while she was filming there. But this job is not all doom and gloom and some of her documentaries have inspired people to go on and start projects of their own. For example, her video on the situation of child labour in India and the impact of an NGO called ‘Toy Bank’ in India led to more fundraising efforts to set up similar ‘toy libraries’ in neighbouring Sri Lanka.
One of the things that really mark a person’s career is his/her first major “setback”. She remembers how she filmed her first documentary about street kids in Vietnam, only to realise when she was back in Singapore that she was short of two minutes of footage because she had not shot enough. A return trip back to Vietnam would have blown the budget and she “was in serious trouble”.
There was also a point in her career when she felt disillusioned with the amount of pay that she was getting, especially compared to her friends in other sectors, and decided to ‘go corporate’ so as to try and earn more money. She now admits that that was a mistake because “money isn’t everything” but it made her realise how much she loved her media work. Her advice for graduating students:
“Follow your passion… it sounds cliché but the last thing you want to do is climb the corporate ladder and be stuck in the rat race and have a job that doesn’t provide you a sense of meaning beyond a pay check.” She muses about how the ‘twenties’ – our undergraduate years – should be a time of experimentation, a time to figure out what one’s passions are.
Her other advice for students is to build up one’s contacts now; start getting connected and start networking. For one, her social encounters with students from all over the world at the University of Toronto, where she went for her exchange programme, taught her a lot.
"Networks are underrated... the friends that you make and the people that you meet in school can actually be very useful later in your professional life. I just wish I had been better in keeping in touch."
“We didn’t have Facebook in my time!” she jokingly adds.
She also strongly advises against going to graduate school immediately after finishing an undergraduate degree, insisting that graduating students would be better off finding a job first before applying for graduate school.
“Those who were in graduate school immediately after graduation approach the course from an ‘academic’ angle whereas people who went to work first have a few years of practical industry experience to frame the things that they were learning at graduate school … and also it (graduate school) was such a welcome break from working.”
For all her rich experiences in the ten years since graduating, from interviewing politicians to climbing oil rigs in Brazil, Forss does not seem like slowing down anytime soon. She is currently working on a series showcasing “second generation” business leaders to dispel the commonly-held belief that the second generations of wealthy families are the ones who squander it all. In all of this, one thing motivates her to keep going.
“Curiosity drives me, I’m just curious about everything.”
Sociology + USP, Class of 2004