Biography|Goh Choon Phong — The Junior College Gate on Bukit Timah Road

People treat a Singapore Airlines chief executive as someone who appeared fully formed at Airline House.

The first public building that can be named in his education is this junior college, at 661 Bukit Timah Road.

Goh Choon Phong was born in Singapore in July 1963.

Before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he graduated from Hwa Chong Junior College, the government-aided pre-university college that opened on this Bukit Timah site on 14 June 1974, next to The Chinese High School.

Exact enrolment and leaving years for him have not been published in the airline biographies.

What is public is the institution and the ground.

The junior college was Singapore's second, and in its early years the largest by enrolment.

Between May 1987 and December 1991 the college left this campus after structural checks that followed the Hotel New World collapse, then returned to a renovated Bukit Timah site on 29 December 1991.

On 1 January 2005 it merged with The Chinese High School to form Hwa Chong Institution.

The junior-college compound is now the college section of that integrated school, still at the same Bukit Timah address, with Gate 2 off Tan Kah Kee Drive.

A visitor standing here is not looking at a preserved 1970s classroom.

The site kept the name and the road, and the college section still teaches the two pre-university years that once carried the letters HCJC.

That is the formation pin: not a private house, and not MIT yet.

A Chinese-medium junior college on Bukit Timah Road, then three bachelor's degrees and a master's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under an airline scholarship.

The later career only makes sense if this gate is left on the map.

Photo: Lyg 2001, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Historic campus scan: JohnLim99, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.