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NTU’s Direct Admission In PhD Programme To Bring More Overseas Exposure  

Following the momentous success of its REP Program or Renaissance Engineering Programme, Nanyang Technological University has now revamped its CN Yang Scholars Programme so as to integrate greater overseas exposure and more courses.

Recently, the officials from the university announced to revamp the CN Yang Scholar programme with an aim to provide direct admission to its PhD Program. This innovative decision by university will allow all CN Yang Scholars to enjoy different overseas research opportunities from the incoming August intake, said the officials.

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This is the first time in the history of NTU that it is offering direct admission to a PhD Program. All the CN Yang Scholars from the incoming August intake will be able to carry out their researches at NTU or will enroll in a joint PhD program offered by any of NTU’s top partner universities.

All the students will get the relevant exposure and required training from Year One so as to get prepared to pursue a PhD.

The core curriculum has also been expanded so as to incorporate different courses, ranging from Climate Science to Computing and many others. The students will also be exposed to the social sciences with courses like leadership, innovation, enterprises, writing and reasoning and ethics.

It has been confirmed by the officials that scholars graduating with at least a Second Class Upper Honors Degree will qualify to do PhD at NTU or a joint PhD with any of NTU’s partner universities. Students enrolling for a joint PhD program will spend half of their four years candidature at NTU, while the remaining half at the partner university, the officials said. Presently, around 20-30 percent of each group of 50 students will go on to do their PhD, NTU’s officials confirmed.

Associate Professor and Director of the CN Yang Scholars Programme, Tan Choon Hong said that, “With the upgraded curriculum, we expect to increase the number of CN Yang scholars who go on to do their PhD from about 20 to 30 per cent in each cohort to 50 per cent,”

The prime feature of this program is that it allows students to spend eight months overseas where they can work on their Final Year Project. The research work will be carried out at the partner universities, which include Imperial College London or Northwestern University in the US. Initially, all the Final Year Projects were conducted locally and students were not exposed to foreign culture and learning environment.

NTU Provost Professor Freddy Boey added that, “Today, frontline research breakthroughs are almost always international and interdisciplinary in nature. That is why it is imperative that our CN Yang scholars must be given opportunities to spend significant time interacting and working with distinguished researchers in world-class research laboratories overseas”.

It is a premier program that attracts top students from the university who either take up a science or engineering degree, with an aim to conduct further research in the field. This program was introduced in the year 2006 and it was named after Nobel Laureate in Physics, Professor CN Yang.

Broadened Scope in Learning 

The overseas exposure will initiate early for the undergraduate program. In Year One, all the CN Yang Scholars will get the chance to go on educational trips to some of the renowned and famous universities or research institutes, which include European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland where the scholars will involve in scientific work.

As a part of the holistic education, the students will be spending two semesters continuously on research attachment where they will be working with any NTU research institute, A*STAR or relevant industrial laboratories.

The increased opportunity to study and research overseas is the biggest and the prime attraction of the new CN Yang Scholars Programme. Most of the students are excited to do their final year project overseas and a PhD program at top foreign universities.