Yale-NUS College
Undergraduate Education
Students at Yale-NUS College share one powerful intellectual experience at the heart of their education: they complete an ambitious programme of courses known as the Common Curriculum. This linked set of courses stimulates a community of learning that is centred on fundamental questions in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Year 1 Semester 1 – Literature and Humanities 1, Philosophy and Political Thought 1, Comparative Social Inquiry, Quantitative Reasoning and Week 7: Learning Across Boundaries (LAB)
Year 1 Semester 2 – Literature and Humanities 2, Philosophy and Political Thought 2 and Scientific Inquiry 2
Year 2 Semester 1 – Modern Social Thought
By end of Year 2 – one 5 unit Science Common Curriculum distribution course
The Science Common Curriculum distribution courses build on the two previous Science Common Curriculum courses (QR and SI 2) by providing students an opportunity to explore more specialized topics. These distribution courses expose students to mathematical and scientific practice, share a set of core learning goals, enhance quantitative skills, and foreground inquiry within specific sub-fields.
All students share the experience of learning how science works, how science knows what it knows (the scientific method), and develop the cognitive tools and apply methods used in particular scientific/mathematical areas. Regardless of the specific topic (the object of inquiry), each student experiences logical or scientific reasoning at college level, uses primary data or calculations, and learns to analyze appropriate primary literature.
Between Year 2 – 4 – 1 Historical Immersion course
By studying these topics together in a structured fashion, students build a common foundation of knowledge that covers many disciplines. They study questions of abiding human interest and of immediate contemporary importance in a deep and sustained manner, and they emerge with a shared set of references, allowing them to fall easily into serious intellectual conversation with one another. In this way, the Common Curriculum creates a lively campus environment of well-informed discussion and debate, which in turn deepens the intellectual development of each student.
Creativity and a sense of wonder are highly prized at Yale-NUS, as are sharp analytic skills and the ability to craft compelling arguments. In each part of the Common Curriculum, students are asked to articulate and defend their positions, beliefs, and assumptions. Through this training, they gain an unusually broad understanding of many fields and a robust confidence in their ability to deploy different modes of thought and analysis. The habits of mind and the intellectual abilities gained through this intense education serve them well as they confront the complex challenges of the 21st century. In addition to the practical benefits that this course of study provides, students often find that a liberal arts and science education offers more personal rewards. It can enrich their inner lives, lead them into friendships different from the ones that they might find elsewhere, and foster their ability to step outside the assumptions of their time and place. The Common Curriculum establishes a broader collegiate environment that helps individuals to cultivate their talents, consider their social responsibilities, and appreciate the humanizing influence of intellectual inquiry.
Teaching and Learning
In most Common Curriculum courses, weekly lectures offer students a sustained analysis of their topic while small seminars encourage more active learning. The seminars are held twice weekly in groups of 18 students. During those sessions the students may plunge into analyzing a data set or discussing the meaning of a challenging text. They may practice different forms of oral argument, from impromptu spoken responses to prepared presentations. The writing they do may consist of creative essays, research papers, or laboratory reports. Students learn to perform quantitative analysis and assess existing scientific evidence; they practice drawing inferences from data and presenting their findings in clear and effective visual formats, cultivating artistic as well as logical skills.
The Common Curriculum contains a degree of intellectual coherence rarely found in higher education today. The courses are coordinated, and each is carefully designed to challenge students from a wide range of academic and individual backgrounds. Students learn to distinguish distinct modes of inquiry and understanding, discover links between disciplines, and connect these insights to diagnosing and resolving problems of contemporary society.
Week 7: Learning Across Boundaries
More popularly known as “Week Seven”, this learning across boundaries course is a distinctive experiential feature of the Common Curriculum’s first year. Conducted mid-semester over a period of one week, students leave the classroom to share insights gained from field observation or meeting with practitioners in different fields and bring them to bear on contemporary problems. Students sometimes travel overseas to collaborate with international partners and experts.
Week 7 faculty lead broad thematic discussions bridging the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and faculty and students share brief but intense learning experiences that cross disciplinary boundaries and encourage creative thought. The week culminates in a day of presentations and performances demonstrating what has been achieved, and students return to the semester’s work refreshed with a renewed sense of purpose.
Yale-NUS College is a dynamic innovation in the world of higher education. Its faculty continuously engage in the exciting process of formulating curricula which draws on the best from the tradition of liberal arts and science education, while rethinking old practices in light of pedagogical innovations, advanced learning technologies, and the needs of 21st century students.
The majors offered represent current thinking of the content, structure, and intellectual flavour of disciplinary study. They are unique as they are designed by faculty in collaboration with students. Students who enter the College are more than recipients of an education; they are crucial participants in the development of an education fit for a rapidly changing world.
Each major provides systematic training in a specific academic discipline or interdisciplinary area. Built on a foundation provided by the Common Curriculum, each major is designed to give students ample scope and flexibility to explore their interest in a chosen area of knowledge, while also providing direction and depth to their studies. The planning and selection of a major is guided by close personalized interactions with faculty advisors at Yale-NUS. In establishing the majors and helping each student map a path through them, faculty members consider not only the merits of each programme component, but also the way in which the components work together to build a coherent set of insights, skills, and knowledge for each student.
Every student at Yale-NUS is required to complete a capstone as part of the major. The capstone experience develops initiative and independence in research. Students present the results of their work at the end of the fourth year to audiences of their peers in the field as well as to faculty and students in other disciplines. Graduating students develop self-confidence and skills that come from having successfully conducted an independent research inquiry.
The learning experience at Yale-NUS College is steep and carefully designed, to expose students to a range of core courses while preserving the flexibilities necessary to encourage independent exploration. An emphasis on diverse traditions and perspectives is intentionally woven into the Yale-NUS curriculum, which requires all students to engage with different academic disciplines, multiple traditions and ways of interacting with knowledge. The rigor of the curriculum encourages students to question relentlessly, think broadly, analyse problems judiciously, and most importantly evaluate the consequences.
Teaching takes place primarily in small, seminar-style classes, which emphasise student-led discussions to produce rich, challenging learning experiences. Students’ classroom experiences are augmented by a wide range of co-curricular activities such as internships, study abroad opportunities and participation in student organisations.
The residential college system has proven an ideal context for liberal arts education at Yale and other leading universities in the United States. Yale-NUS College’s full residential programme provides an immersive experience where living and learning are intertwined, and encourages active learning, adaptability and different modes of critical thought. Students live in and become active members of one of the residential colleges during their four years in the College. Headed by a Rector and Assistant Dean, each residential college has its own distinctive culture.
The residential curriculum is an intentionally curated sequence of programmes, discussions and activities that students will experience in their four years of campus living, designed to maximise learning, growth and engagement opportunities outside of the formal classroom. Through committed participation in our residential colleges, students become engaged community members, practise intercultural engagement, and learn the skills of self-care and care for others. Over the course of four years living on campus, the residential curriculum helps cultivate well-rounded graduates ready to tackle today's local and global issues.
Yale-NUS College offers a full-time, four-year course of study, culminating in either of the following:
- Bachelor of Arts with Honours
- Bachelor of Science with Honours
Each student selects a Major from 14 fields of study.
- Anthropology
- Arts & Humanities
- Economics
- Environmental Studies
- Global Affairs
- History
- Life Sciences
- Literature
- Mathematical and Computational Sciences
- Philosophy
- Philosophy, Politics and Economics
- Physical Sciences
- Psychology
- Urban Studies
Concurrent Degree Programmes
- Concurrent Degree Programme with Yale School of Public Health
- Concurrent Degree Programme with Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
- Concurrent Degree Programme with NUS School of Computing
Special Programmes
- Double Degree Programme in Law and Liberal Arts
- Silver Scholars Programme with Yale School of Management
- Special Programme with Yale School of the Environment
- Pathway with Duke-NUS Medical School
Students at Yale-NUS College share one powerful intellectual experience at the heart of their education: they complete an ambitious programme of courses known as the Common Curriculum. This linked set of courses stimulates a community of learning that is centred on fundamental questions in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Year 1 Semester 1 – Literature and Humanities 1, Philosophy and Political Thought 1, Comparative Social Inquiry, Quantitative Reasoning and Week 7: Learning Across Boundaries (LAB)
Year 1 Semester 2 – Literature and Humanities 2, Philosophy and Political Thought 2 and Scientific Inquiry 2
Year 2 Semester 1 – Modern Social Thought
By end of Year 2 – one 5 unit Science Common Curriculum distribution course
The Science Common Curriculum distribution courses build on the two previous Science Common Curriculum courses (QR and SI 2) by providing students an opportunity to explore more specialized topics. These distribution courses expose students to mathematical and scientific practice, share a set of core learning goals, enhance quantitative skills, and foreground inquiry within specific sub-fields.
All students share the experience of learning how science works, how science knows what it knows (the scientific method), and develop the cognitive tools and apply methods used in particular scientific/mathematical areas. Regardless of the specific topic (the object of inquiry), each student experiences logical or scientific reasoning at college level, uses primary data or calculations, and learns to analyze appropriate primary literature.
Between Year 2 – 4 – 1 Historical Immersion course
By studying these topics together in a structured fashion, students build a common foundation of knowledge that covers many disciplines. They study questions of abiding human interest and of immediate contemporary importance in a deep and sustained manner, and they emerge with a shared set of references, allowing them to fall easily into serious intellectual conversation with one another. In this way, the Common Curriculum creates a lively campus environment of well-informed discussion and debate, which in turn deepens the intellectual development of each student.
Creativity and a sense of wonder are highly prized at Yale-NUS, as are sharp analytic skills and the ability to craft compelling arguments. In each part of the Common Curriculum, students are asked to articulate and defend their positions, beliefs, and assumptions. Through this training, they gain an unusually broad understanding of many fields and a robust confidence in their ability to deploy different modes of thought and analysis. The habits of mind and the intellectual abilities gained through this intense education serve them well as they confront the complex challenges of the 21st century. In addition to the practical benefits that this course of study provides, students often find that a liberal arts and science education offers more personal rewards. It can enrich their inner lives, lead them into friendships different from the ones that they might find elsewhere, and foster their ability to step outside the assumptions of their time and place. The Common Curriculum establishes a broader collegiate environment that helps individuals to cultivate their talents, consider their social responsibilities, and appreciate the humanizing influence of intellectual inquiry.
Teaching and Learning
In most Common Curriculum courses, weekly lectures offer students a sustained analysis of their topic while small seminars encourage more active learning. The seminars are held twice weekly in groups of 18 students. During those sessions the students may plunge into analyzing a data set or discussing the meaning of a challenging text. They may practice different forms of oral argument, from impromptu spoken responses to prepared presentations. The writing they do may consist of creative essays, research papers, or laboratory reports. Students learn to perform quantitative analysis and assess existing scientific evidence; they practice drawing inferences from data and presenting their findings in clear and effective visual formats, cultivating artistic as well as logical skills.
The Common Curriculum contains a degree of intellectual coherence rarely found in higher education today. The courses are coordinated, and each is carefully designed to challenge students from a wide range of academic and individual backgrounds. Students learn to distinguish distinct modes of inquiry and understanding, discover links between disciplines, and connect these insights to diagnosing and resolving problems of contemporary society.
Week 7: Learning Across Boundaries
More popularly known as “Week Seven”, this learning across boundaries course is a distinctive experiential feature of the Common Curriculum’s first year. Conducted mid-semester over a period of one week, students leave the classroom to share insights gained from field observation or meeting with practitioners in different fields and bring them to bear on contemporary problems. Students sometimes travel overseas to collaborate with international partners and experts.
Week 7 faculty lead broad thematic discussions bridging the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and faculty and students share brief but intense learning experiences that cross disciplinary boundaries and encourage creative thought. The week culminates in a day of presentations and performances demonstrating what has been achieved, and students return to the semester’s work refreshed with a renewed sense of purpose.
Yale-NUS College is a dynamic innovation in the world of higher education. Its faculty continuously engage in the exciting process of formulating curricula which draws on the best from the tradition of liberal arts and science education, while rethinking old practices in light of pedagogical innovations, advanced learning technologies, and the needs of 21st century students.
The majors offered represent current thinking of the content, structure, and intellectual flavour of disciplinary study. They are unique as they are designed by faculty in collaboration with students. Students who enter the College are more than recipients of an education; they are crucial participants in the development of an education fit for a rapidly changing world.
Each major provides systematic training in a specific academic discipline or interdisciplinary area. Built on a foundation provided by the Common Curriculum, each major is designed to give students ample scope and flexibility to explore their interest in a chosen area of knowledge, while also providing direction and depth to their studies. The planning and selection of a major is guided by close personalized interactions with faculty advisors at Yale-NUS. In establishing the majors and helping each student map a path through them, faculty members consider not only the merits of each programme component, but also the way in which the components work together to build a coherent set of insights, skills, and knowledge for each student.
Every student at Yale-NUS is required to complete a capstone as part of the major. The capstone experience develops initiative and independence in research. Students present the results of their work at the end of the fourth year to audiences of their peers in the field as well as to faculty and students in other disciplines. Graduating students develop self-confidence and skills that come from having successfully conducted an independent research inquiry.