Undergraduate Education

In July 2019, some 200 students, representing 30 nationalities and 70 universities convened in SMU’s city campus for the annual Global Summer Programme (GSP). Accepting its largest intake since its launch five years ago, GSP comprised 10 credit-bearing courses that drew upon the expertise of faculty from across SMU’s six schools.

Assistant Professor Yasmin Ortiga of the SMU School of Social Sciences was recently awarded the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship 2019 for her research on higher education in the Philippines.

Tan Kar Way, the winner of the 2019 Innovative Teacher Award, spent years refining her teaching methodology. She explains the experiences and goals that shaped her meticulous approach.

Undergraduates in Singapore and China spent the summer learning about each other’s homeland Youths with cross-cultural experiences are able to build better rapport with people from different backgrounds. That was part of the thinking behind the Sino-Singapore Undergraduate Exchange (SSUE), a cultural exchange programme initiated in 2002 by ESM Goh Chok Tong (then-Singapore’s Prime Minister) and Mr Hu Jintao (then-Vice President of the People’s Republic of China).

From August 2019, students in all six SMU schools can prepare for the world of big data by taking up this second major The only constant is change — this adage has never been more apt, with traditional industries now being upended by technology all over the world. A new generation increasingly finds themselves in jobs that didn’t exist just a few years ago, and what careers of the future will look like is anyone’s guess.

SMU students will be able to take up Singapore’s first Sustainability major and gain a competitive advantage upon graduation

With Globalisation 4.0 in motion, the waves of connectivity and digital transformation that it rides on are set to revolutionise the way we do things.

From the Imperial Academy in ancient China that equipped the emperor with bureaucrats to Western Europe’s first university in Bologna, Italy, around 1,000 years later, the earliest universities had no need to move with the times. They were repositories of a largely unchanging body of knowledge centred on religion, spirituality and supporting the status quo.

In recent years, e-commerce, data analytics, artificiaI intelligence and machine learning have made the quantum leap from being mere buzzwords to real revenue-generating technologies: a fact borne out by a 2018 study by US management consultancy Bain & Co which found that digitalisation could grow the Asean gross domestic product by an estimated SGD 1 trillion by 2025.

Beyond infiltrating the business lexicon, the notion of sustainability is becoming a part of business strategy. After all, all signs are pointing towards a focus on sustainability in businesses: from government-led initiatives to create infrastructure that addresses the problems of climate change, to growing consumer demand for sustainable brands. It is becoming more important for organisations to embrace and promote sustainability on environmental, social and economic fronts as a long-term business game plan.