NUS course selection - first challenge!

NUS courses!

NUS offers a remarkably wide range of courses, and as an exchange student, you are pretty much free to choose any courses, subject to the approval of your home university and the fulfillment of prerequisites. I strongly recommend NUS exchanger-to-be to check the course offerings for exchange students available for the selected semester on their website. Read carefully the REGISTRATION GUIDE, all information is basically there (just type it in Google, you'll get the link, there's no point in trying to find through their sophisticated webpage=.=). Here's the page for you to start http://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/edu/ng.html#l5

As an undergraduate level exchanger from Aalto, you'll need to take 5 courses at NUS to fulfill the 30 ECTS requirement for the exchange studies. You can choose 10 courses from their offered courses when you apply online, out of which maximum 5 courses will be granted to you. BEFORE you submit your list of favorable courses, the next VITAL step, check out their Timetable building https://webrb.nus.edu.sg/ctt/builder.aspx  , plug in the codes of your selected courses, your faculty and semester and check whether there are any clashes in terms of timetable and exam dates. NUS is particularly strict with this, should there be any clashes in the lecture/tutorial/exam date, you will NOT be allowed to take those courses together by any means. Thus, to avoid the unfortunate situation that you might not get any courses, check in advance, choose the suitable courses and choose 10 courses, not 5 or 6 or 7 or 8, to maximize your chance of having enough courses before your semester starts!

TIP! If you wanna travel during the semester and end your semester early for more traveling, this is the time for you to check all the exam dates and lecture&tutorial times of these courses:) I have many friends who managed to have courses only from Monday to Wednesday, and they are all off for traveling almost every weekend without any problems=))

One thing for sure, you do NOT want to participate in their so-called Add Drop period at the beginning of the semester- a REAL HEADACHE! If you have all 5 of your favorite courses accepted and enjoy them after trying them out in the first week, you can forget about this. BUT if you don't, as in my case and many others who chose mainly Business modules, you are gonna have very interesting times going to different other classes to try out, wait for add drop period, add, wait for approval, blah blah blah >_< Anyway, it's not fun at all, since you won't have access to the course materials of your intended course on IVLE system ( a system similar to Noppa & Optima at Aalto), and you can't simply switch the courses that you don't like with your intended ones, and you'll need to get permission from Aalto International Office again about your new course choice.

Anyway, after the first 2-week hassle with the course selection, I manage to secure my 5 courses from Economics and Political Science as below.

EC3377 Global Economic History
EC3394 Economics and Psychology
EC3312 Game Theory and Applications in Economics
PS2234 Introduction to Comparative Politics
PS2203 Ancient Western Political Thoughts

TIP: Ask from the International Office at Aalto an approval paper for all the 10 chosen courses that you will apply in the NUS system, you'll stand better chance of securing the courses from NUS. If you can't get enough 5 courses in the notification from your NUS application for some weird reasons, immediately contact Aalto International Office and ask them to help you out with it. In my case, NUS offered me only 4 courses by mistake, and they never really answered my e-mail requests to the point, but when I asked Minna from the International Office to help me, I got my 5th course in no time:)

I major in Economics at Aalto, but I don't necessarily think that I've had enough training in Economics as I've wanted, so I take more "exotic" courses here. I want to enhance my critical thinking skills and brush up my writing skills, which, is unfortunately seriously deficient in studies at Aalto so far. Besides, as I want to further my academic career in research, these courses suit my purpose better than any of the Business courses offered at the School of Business. So unlike many other students, I have all my courses exclusively at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), not at the Business School:P

That's all for now, next blog to go, I'll give you guys some insights about the courses that I have chosen and the academic environment in NUS.