The Common Curriculum is an essential part of the academic life at Yale-NUS. Courses are created to be multi-disciplinary and to drive critical, creative and active thinking. The Common Curriculum engineered at Yale-NUS includes the following:
In this two-semester course, students explore myths and stories across time and space to understand how writers represented and shaped the worlds in which they and their audience lived. The course aims to cultivate the cultural, aesthetic and rhetorical literacy needed to become a cosmopolitan reader of human experience.
This course, taught over two semesters, introduces students to the greatest figures in the history of philosophy and political thought. It addresses fundamental and recurring questions about the nature of reality and how we know it – the nature of the self, consciousness, the gods or God, happiness, moral conduct, and the character of law,...
Human beings are inherently social. We exist in families, tribes, cities and nations, work in organisations, and interact through networks. We are simultaneously the product and shapers of these norms and institutions. This course investigates these connections and raises awareness of social forces that determine how we live.
This course aims to develop skills and confidence in various kinds of mathematical reasoning with the aim of helping students become critical and informed readers of quantitative data. The course relies on team-based learning to ensure that students who bring diverse talents and backgrounds to the course can learn together and from one another. ...
Science is often thought of as a collection of “facts” about our world. In reality, our understanding of the world has progressed to an extent that is “asymptotically true”. These two courses examine how we arrive at our understanding of the world. They ask, “What do we know?” and “How do we know that?” Over...
Historical Immersion courses investigate, study, and explore aspects of the past and pose the question of how we know what we know. This series of courses stands in contrast with the rest of the Common Curriculum, which ranges widely across space and times. Historical Immersion courses focus on a particular historical moment, event, or individua...
Learning Across Boundaries (LAB) take students, faculty, and staff out of the traditional classroom setting. The Week 7 LAB has become one of the College’s flagship offerings, highlighting aspects of Yale-NUS’ distinctive education such as interdisciplinarity, innovative pedagogy, experience-based learning, and unparalleled access to professors ...