FAQs
Here are some quick answers to questions about NUS College. If you have any other queries, you can reach out to us at nuscollege@nus.edu.sg or nusc.admissions@nus.edu.sg (admissions-related matters).
NUS College is the honours College of NUS. NUS College’s broad-based interdisciplinary curriculum, residential life programme, and flagship impact experience and global pathways programme complement a student’s major studies. Although NUS College students will belong to a home college, faculty or school in NUS, they will take part of their common curriculum and elective requirements at NUS College (see Learn Overview page), and live in the NUS College residential colleges. This gives NUS College students the opportunity to form a close-knit community with peers from more than 50 majors across NUS, working closely with and alongside NUS College faculty members.
NUS College does not have its own majors, instead, NUS College will offer an innovative interdisciplinary common curriculum. This is complementary to your chosen major, which you will pursue at your home college, faculty or school.
Not at all, students at NUS who are not in the NUS College programme are also able to obtain honours degrees in their majors, given that they meet the specific requirements of the Honours track in their course. NUS College is referred to as an “honours college” (a concept borrowed from US universities) as it is committed to small seminar-style , close student-professor relations and more opportunities for interdisciplinary academic rigour.
Yes. There are plenty of scholarship and financial aid options available. More information can be found here.
There are two fee components for NUS College students:
Tuition Fee – As NUS College students will pursue a major in a home college, faculty or school, tuition fees will be pegged to the student’s home college, faculty or school at NUS. For more information on tuition fees, click here. Do take note that no additional tuition fees will be charged for NUS College courses.
Residential College Fee – NUS College students are required to live on campus, in one of the NUS College residential wings, for a minimum of two years to benefit from the NUS College residential experience. Students will pay the prevailing rate for the room and meal plan applicable. More information can be found here.
Yes, all NUS College students will have access to the financial aid options available for NUS students. Please click here to find out more.
NUSC is an honours college for students who wish to enhance their degree. We expect NUSC students to (subjectively) feel challenged in our classes for various reasons, including the larger extent of interaction with instructors; but as a matter of what the (objective) data tells us, NUSC students do very well in NUSC courses, including grades wise. Our students are engaged and seek help when needed, from the instructors and from peers. NUSC regards the out-of-classroom discussions between students from different faculties as integral to the student learning experience.
NUSC courses do not implement the NUS grades distribution, and this is according to NUS policy, since the enrolment in each class is small. Grading is according to academic standards.
You may apply for admissions to NUS College through the NUS Office of Admissions (OAM) online applications portal together with your general application to NUS undergraduate courses. Please click here for the application details.
Indicate your interest in NUS College by checking the box “I wish to be considered for NUS College”, which will be found within the application portal. You will then be directed to submit additional application materials to NUS OAM.
Not to worry as there is no minimum score requirement for applicants to be eligible. All applicants for NUS College will be thoroughly reviewed via a holistic admissions process that will take into consideration your academic results as well as your co-curricular involvements and personal pursuits.
You will need to submit the following when applying to NUS College:
- Academic results from recent years of study (e.g. JC preliminary, promotional exam result, etc) and final official results (if any)
- A record of co-curricular activities or personal
- Certificates of achievement
- Writing responses to three short-answer questions and one admissions essay
More details are available within the application portal.
No. If you are not offered a place in NUS College, your application to NUS will be processed in exactly the same way as it would have been without indicating an interest in NUS College.
Opening and closing dates for the various application qualifications are in line with NUS Office of Admissions. Please click here for more detailed information.
Yes, NUSC accepts transfer students from NUS as well as other institutions, and does so only for the Semester 1 intake. However, the candidates must first be accepted by their respective degree-bearing faculty in NUS and be assessed through the NUSC admissions exercise.
Do note that all NUSC students must start as Year 1, Semester 1 students and fulfil the NUSC graduation requirements, which includes obtaining an honours degree from their degree-bearing faculty. If you are an existing NUS student and wish to transfer into NUSC, you may only do so if you are changing your degree programme. In that case, all the credits that you have previously obtained within NUS will no longer count toward your GPA and there may be implications on fee subsidies during the candidature of your programme.
For more information, please see the transfer requirements, and note the corresponding application period (under ‘Important Dates’).
No. The application window for NUS College is concurrent with the general application to NUS undergraduate courses.
Yes. NUS College aims to enrol a diverse community of students from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. We welcome international applicants. Applicants presenting international qualifications may be required to submit their SAT/ACT/AP scores. For more information, click here.
Yes, you may still indicate interest in applying for NUS College, if you have also indicated a programme that is compatible with NUS College among your eight choices. To illustrate, suppose an applicant applies to NUS College with the following programme choices, and is found suitable by NUS College. The table below provides the possible outcomes.
| Rank | Programme | Compatible with NUS College | Outcome 1 | Outcome 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Medicine | NO | Offered (without NUS College)* | Not offered |
| 2 | Psychology | YES | Not offered | Offered (with NUS College) |
| 3 | Humanities & Social Sciences | YES | Not offered | Not offered |
* For students who ultimately matriculate with the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS College offers an “NUSC Experience” certificate to a few selected students who applied to NUS College with Medicine as their first choice major. To help these students manage both the NUSC and Medicine programmes, they read fewer NUSC courses (one foundational and two electives), but are expected to stay in the NUSC residential wings and be actively involved in the college and out-of-classroom activities over the course of about two years. Shortlisted students will be notified for a separate interview after matriculation.
Students majoring in Pharmaceutical Science, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), Law, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Industrial Design will need to go through a separate interview process for admission into the relevant host college, faculty, or school. For all other majors, NUS College will admit students in consultation with our partner faculties. However, some partner faculties may still interview students concurrently with NUS College for the faculty aptitude-based admission process. Please note that the application process to the Yong Siew Toh School of Music and NUS College is described separately above.
Yes. Applicants who are entering National Service may apply. If accepted, they will enrol when they have completed National Service (i.e. deferring their matriculation). Their fees will be pegged to the year they accept the admissions offer to NUS and are admitted to NUS College.
For those who have already been offered and accepted into a course at NUS, the procedure is to put in a new application if you are interested in NUS College. If you wish to keep the major that you had accepted, it is important that you specify the same major in your new application, and, please do not enter any other choices for your major. Alternatively, if you wish to change your major, you may also apply with new choices.
It is important to note that you will not lose your place in the course you have already accepted if you did not receive an offer for your new application. However, if you are given an offer with your new application, the new offer will supercede your previous acceptance. In order to secure your place in NUS, you will need to accept the new offer.
We typically receive a large number of applicants from NS men due to matriculate in two years’ time. NUSC makes a limited number of offers to such applicants, in order to ensure that there are enough places for the upcoming admissions cycle. Thus, RNS who did not secure a place in NUSC in a previous application, but are keen on enrolling in NUSC, are encouraged to reapply. They will be evaluated according to the acceptance criteria of incoming students in the current admissions cycle. Please refer to the previous FAQ on the procedure and implications of reapplication.
NUS College evaluates all our applicants in a thorough, holistic process. We ask each applicant to submit academic results from recent years of study, a record of past co-curricular involvements and personal pursuits, and to complete some writing sections (short questions and one essay).
Shortlisted students will be invited to an interview so that the Admissions Committee can learn more about their interests and potential fit for NUS College.
You should apply for admission to Yong Siew Toh Conservatory as per their requirements. During your admissions interview with the Conservatory, you should mention that you are interested in applying for NUS College. The admissions team will make their recommendations of shortlisted candidates for the Conservatory with NUS College and relay their list to us. We will contact the shortlisted candidates to take a written assessment ans admission interview with us. Information on how to apply to the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory can be found here.
Details on the NUS College curriculum and how it interacts with your degree can be found below or here.
To receive an NUS College graduation certificate, you will need to:
- Complete the NUS College courses required for pairing with your major,
- Fulfil the compulsory Global Pathways requirement,
- Complete your degree programme with at least Honours (Merit), and
- Fulfil the compulsory two-year residential requirement at NUS College.
The NUS College curriculum and experience can be paired with 55 majors offered by colleges, faculties and schools across NUS. The exceptions are Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy. You may find out more here.
At the point of application, you must indicate an intended major/choice of course at NUS College, which you will read at your respective home faculty or school (the exception being CHS students who have the flexibility of having an undeclared major for the first two years of studies). Subsequently, all students of NUS College will enjoy the flexibility to apply to transfer to another major compatible with the NUS College curriculum during their first four semesters of study, within the transfer windows stipulated by the NUS Office of Admissions.
The NUS College curriculum is meant to enhance the basic NUS degree and is designed to interface well with other programmes and course requirements at NUS. Like other NUS students, you will fulfil a portion of your courses at your home faculty, primarily courses that fulfil your major requirements. However, students will be able to complete all NUS General Education (GE) requirements in NUS College, as well as most faculty-specific common curriculum courses.*
*NUS College students will be able to complete all elements of the common curriculum for the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS) and most for the College of Design and Engineering (CDE).
The NUS College curriculum consists of specially curated foundational and common courses, interdisciplinary electives and a flagship team-based project. A key difference between courses in NUS College compared to the common curriculum course in NUS is the small class sizes. This allows for intimate seminar-style learning where students get to interact more meaningfully with their professors. Furthermore, unlike common curriculum classes in your home faculty, your peers will be from different majors and faculties, facilitating the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas in the classroom.
Students will fulfil 14 courses (56 modular credits) as part of the NUS College curriculum, comprising 7 common foundational courses, 6 interdisciplinary electives and finally, students will consolidate their learning through the capstone Impact Experience Project (IEx).
Not at all! The NUS College curriculum allows students to complete all NUS General Education (GE) requirements in NUS College, as well as all elements of the common curriculum for the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS) and most for the College of Design and Engineering (CDE). As for students from other faculties, NUS College courses will substitute a portion of their unrestricted electives.
Yes, there are a variety of pre-packaged multidisciplinary programmes (MDPs) within NUS that are available to NUS College applicants. You may find out more about the MDPs here. Do take note that these have an additional selection for admission. Additionally, any NUS student (including NUS College students) may also construct/propose their own MDP by combining courses at NUS, though not all of them will be feasible and overloading may be necessary to complete the graduation requirements.
We are also pleased to partner with Sciences Po and Waseda University for the NUS-Sciences Po Double Degree Programme and Waseda-NUS Double Degree Programme [see DDP page]. For these DDPs, you will obtain a degree from NUS and a degree from our partner university.
Students pursuing specific degree programmes in NUS—for instance, Law, Engineering, Accountancy, PPE, the Double Degree programmes, to name a few examples—are waived from some of the curriculum requirements in NUS College. This is so that students pursuing these degrees will be able to integrate their curriculum with the requirements in NUS College. In general, students pursuing single degrees will not need to overload in order to complete both their degree requirements and NUS College requirements.
As these courses have more specialised courses and fixed curriculum, it is difficult for students to complete both their major’s courses as well as courses from NUS College’s common curriculum without extending their period of study.
All incoming freshmen will be assigned a peer mentor – a senior taking the same course as them (or as similar as possible since there are different multidisciplinary programmes). These mentors will guide you beginning from the very first course registration exercise and help you map out your study plan for your entire university journey. There are also multiple academic-related chat groups set up to allow students to seek more specific advice regarding certain courses or academic programmes. If you require more help, the NUS College faculty advisors are always there to advise you as well.
If you would like to request to switch majors before the admission application closing date relevant to you leading to your course start year, you will need to submit a fresh application to NUS for your desired new major(s). You may indicate your new choice(s) in your new application.
However, you should not apply to NUS College again. If you are successful in your new application, the NUS Office of Admissions will offer the new major to you together with NUS College. If you are not successful, the offer that you have already accepted will remain.
Please do not check the section for application to NUS College and be sure not to fill any of the fields related to NUS College. If you do so, your application may be treated as a fresh application for NUS College and you may risk not being offered NUS College with your new application.
If you have missed the relevant admissions application closing date relevant to you leading up to your course start year, and you would like to request to switch majors, you will need to submit an appeal to the NUS Office of Admissions for consideration. You may do so during the NUS Office of Admissions appeal window by logging into the NUS Applicants Portal and submitting an appeal.
If you would like to request to switch majors before the start of Sem 1, you will need to submit an appeal to the NUS Office of Admissions for consideration. You may do so during the NUS Office of Admissions appeal window by logging into the NUS Applicants Portal and submitting an appeal.
If you have missed the admissions appeal window, you may contact the NUS Office of Admissions to request for an appeal to switch majors.
You will need to submit an application to the NUS College Academic Team during the usual transfer windows (October and February). Do note that you will only be allowed to change your major within your first four semesters. The NUS College Academic Team will provide advice to you pertaining to your request.
Global Pathways at NUS College aims to crystalise the foundational learning of global perspectives and world issues by immersing students in international programmes located around the world. There are five main pathways that students can choose to fulfil the NUS College global experience requirement – the Global Experience Course (GEx), the NUS Overseas College (NOC), Student Exchange Programmes (SEP), Double Degree Programmes (NUS-Sciences Po and Waseda-NUS), and Regional Impact Experience projects (IEx).
GEx is a specially curated course involving four weeks at a chosen city during which students explore a theme unique to each city. GEx will involve activities such as seminars with guest professors, workshops with practitioners, masterclasses with experts, fireside chats with important personalities, and field visits to pertinent sites such as start-ups, research centres, government offices, cultural and community institutions.
GEx will take place during the vacation period, with preparatory seminars in the semester before and assignments due in the semester after.
Currently, the following regions are available for GEx: Bali/Lombok, Beijing, Chicago, Mekong Delta, New York, Paris, Sulawesi, Tokyo, Toronto, Upper Mekong, Yogyakarta/Bandung.
GEx is available to NUS College students on a competitive basis, with spaces for up to 60 percent of each cohort, made available each year.
All NOC programmes are open to NUS students, including NUS College students. Visit the NUS Overseas Colleges website for more information.
NUS College students will get green lane access to NOC programmes where they get an opportunity to skip NOC’s internal interview and interview directly with potential internship companies. However, the green lane does not guarantee NUSC students a place on NOC.
Applications for Global Pathways take place only after matriculation except the NUS-Sciences Po Double Degree Programme (DDP). The NUS-Sciences Po DDP application should be submitted concurrently with your NUS College application. See this page for more information.
Global Pathways is a graduation requirement for all NUS College students who matriculate from 2022 onwards. There are five pathways that students can choose from to fulfil this requirement:
- Global Experience Course (GEx)
- NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC)
- Student Exchange Programme (SEP) – through NUS College or degree-bearing faculties
- NUS College’s Double Degree Programmes (DDP)
- Regional Impact Experience (IEx) Projects
The Global Pathways requirement should only be fulfilled through the five pathways. However, if you have extenuating circumstances and are only able to fulfil the requirements through other global opportunities in NUS, please write to the NUS College Global Pathways team.
NUS College students are welcome to apply for exchange programmes offered by NUS partner universities through their home faculties, which are open to all NUS students.
The ‘Impact Experience Project’ (IEx) is a flagship programme in NUS College. Students will work in teams to design, plan, and execute an impact-oriented project through Research, Innovation, Service, and creative Expression (RISE). Each team will be supervised by a faculty member and will be provided with financial resources, connections, and mentorship to undertake the project locally or internationally. See this page to understand better.
Yes, IEx is compulsory for all NUS College students. The course incorporates a strong service learning component and is meant for students to consolidate their learning across the whole NUS College experience.
Interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation is deliberately cultivated in all IEx groups as a way of channelling the multidisciplinary makeup of faculty and students towards achieving social impact. This principle is reflected in three cluster groupings: Science & Tech, Civic & Community, and Arts & Design. Under the guidance of Cluster Supervisors who cover a diverse range of inter- and multidisciplinary specialisations, students will focus on a wicked problem faced by a community that reflects important challenges of the 21st century, then propose and implement upstream solutions. These projects can be based in Singapore or in a neighbouring country.
Students will be graded on their research preparation, group project proposal, individual service reflections on learning, and group creative practice components.
Most students will spread out the 160 hours of coursework over two years, starting from the second year of their study.
NUS College students will stay at one of our two residential wings at University Town – Cinnamon Wing and West Wing. All first-year NUS College students stay at Cinnamon Wing.
Local students with a home address in Singapore will be guaranteed residence in one of the residential wings during the first three years of candidature. If senior students who have completed the required residency wish to stay on in the fourth year, NUS College will try to accommodate these students, but this is subject to availability.
Residency guarantees and assurances are subject to students being in good standing, both academically and in discipline records.
International students with no alternative Singapore residency options may rest assured that their residency needs will be given priority in our planning and support.
With effect from AY2023-2024, international students who do not have a home address in Singapore will be guaranteed residence in an NUS College residential wing throughout the four years of candidature.
Yes. NUS College is first and foremost a faculty; an honours college with a four-year broad-based interdisciplinary common curriculum. It also has an integrated residential component (under which students are required to spend at least 2 years in one of its residential wings).
Please click here for estimated costs for housing. NUS College is committed to providing opportunities for all deserving students. Students are strongly encouraged to apply to the NUS Office of Financial Aid if affordability is a concern.
Yes, meal plans are compulsory for all NUS College residents staying on campus. The meal plan includes breakfast and dinner six times a week (excluding Saturday dinners and Sunday breakfasts).
Please click here for information on meal plan rates.