All about: Singapore Management University

Singapore Management University is one of the world's youngest universities, only beginning life at the start of the 21st century. It is a business school. It also introduced new methods of teaching and learning into the Singaporean tertiary educational sector. This article outlines the facts about the Singapore Management University.

History and location

Singapore Management University (SMU) occupies a site in central Singapore in the Bugis-Bras Basah district. This area has a lengthy association with education, and is close to many hubs of commercial and cultural life in the city. SMU moved there in 2005, after previously spending its initial five years of operations on a site at Bukit Timah. As the youngest university in Singapore, SMU was only incorporated in January 2000. The idea of a third university for Singapore was first mooted in 1997, when the Deputy Prime Minister Dr Tony Tan backed ideas to make a new institution, which is entirely different in outlook and ethos from the two other universities already in place, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). American style of education The university's earliest policy-makers also decided that the institution should offer a more broad-based American style of education to its students, rather than the more specialised British model which is employed by the other two universities.

Learning and lifestyle

SMU at Singapore currently has 7,000 students on its roll, and makes a conscious effort to model its style of education after the Wharton School, an American business school which is located at the University of Pennsylvania. For academic and administrative purposes, SMU is divided into six schools. These are: -The School of Accountancy
-The Lee Kong Chian School of Business
-The School of Economics
-The School of Information Systems
-The School of Law
-The School of Social Sciences
Bachelor's degree programmes There is a comprehensive range of business courses on offer to students at the university. There are six Bachelor's degree programmes available for study in the following fields: -Accountancy
-Business Management
-Economics
-Information Systems Management
-Laws
-Social Sciences Master's programmes Additionally, 12 Master's programmes are also on offer in disciplines such as: -Applied Economics
-Applied Finance
-Business Administration
-Communication Management
-Economics
-Finance
-Professional Accounting
-Operations Management
-Wealth Management PhD programmes With a Juris Doctor programme also in place, as well as five PhD programmes in Economics, Information Systems, Business (Finance), Business, Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources and Psychology. The opportunity exists for students to maximise their business educational potential. SMU has a teaching faculty of 300, with many individuals who are recruited from specialist business fields rather than academia, boosting the availability of a specialist, practical expertise on offer to students.