SMU’s transformative education approach was highlighted in a special feature. Instead of lectures, SMU employs seminar-style teaching and highly interactive learning in small-sized classes. The latest Graduate Employment Survey shows that 93.8 per cent of SMU graduates in the labour force were employed within six months of completing their final examinations, with more than half being offered jobs before graduation. SMU also topped local universities on graduate employment rate, partnerships with employers and employer-student connections in this year's QS Graduate Employability Rankings.
Some of the new programmes at SMU were highlighted, including the revamped curriculum of the School of Information Systems, the newly introduced Politics, Law and Economics (PLE) major offered by the School of Social Sciences, as well as the new Entrepreneurship major by the Lee Kong Chian School of Business. Other initiatives include the innovative and award-winning SMU-X, an experimental and experiential learning pedagogy that challenges students to tackle real-world problems faced by actual organisations; a compulsory core module called "Managing in a VUCA Context" in 2015, which aims to prepare students to deal with challenges and solve problems in a VUCA – short for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – world; and "The Internet of Things (IoT): Technology and Applications" elective.
The article also mentioned the freshly renovated SMU Campus Green, the newly-opened building for the School of Law, and the new lyf@SMU (a dynamic and trend-setting co-study, co-work, co-living environment within SMU Labs), among SMU’s new initiatives to uplift student life at the university. Through the combination of a unique curriculum, innovative pedagogy and state-of-the-art facilities, SMU students transform into well-rounded leaders who are versatile, bold, articulate and contextually aware, and who have better prospects to make a meaningful impact in a rapidly changing world.