Biography | Tan Su Shan — The Turl Street College Where She Finished PPE

An incoming DBS chief executive is easy to file under Shenton Way and Marina Boulevard.

The British campus that belongs in the record is Lincoln College, on Turl Street in Oxford.

Tan Su Shan left Singapore after her GCE A-Levels and read politics, philosophy and economics there.

Later bank filings and company announcements list a Master of Arts from Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in 1989.

That is how the degree is written on the public record.

Oxford’s own custom is more particular: PPE is taken as an undergraduate course, and the MA is a later status rather than a separate taught programme.

The year still sits where the filings put it.

Lincoln was founded in 1427 by Richard Fleming, then Bishop of Lincoln.

The Turl Street front and the two-storey Front Quad still read as a fifteenth-century college more than most Oxford fronts do.

That is the pin: the college gate on Turl Street, not a generic Oxford skyline and not a private student room.

A later interview published by Singapore Management University records that in her second Oxford year she took a summer internship in London with Rothschild Asset Management and visited the dealing room at Barings Securities.

The internship trail matters because it is how a PPE student crossed into markets.

After Oxford she began at ING Baring Securities in institutional equity and derivative sales, with postings in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

The Barings collapse in 1995 ended that first employer.

Bloomberg later reported the same week cost her the Hong Kong flat and a long relationship.

Those are public facts she has put on the record; they are not pinned here.

The college remains the formation site.

From Turl Street the working life runs through Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, a return to Morgan Stanley as Southeast Asia private-wealth head, and then DBS in July 2010.

Photo: Rémi Mathis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons