Why NUS BBA

The Accountancy major is a full-fledged accountancy degree built on a strong foundation of business knowledge with a specialised rigorous focus on accountancy.

Graduates are qualified to directly enter the professional stage of the Singapore CA Qualification, the path to becoming a Singapore Chartered Accountant. The Singapore CA Qualification is the national CA qualification, developed by the Singapore Accountancy Commission (SAC) and administered by the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants (ISCA). This internationally recognised and portable qualification offers an Asian perspective. Combined with three years of working experience at an SAC Accredited Training Organisation (including Big 4 accounting firms), candidates receive a well-rounded education with both technical knowledge and practical guidance.

The Singapore CA Qualification is continually reviewed to maintain high standards whilst ensuring professionals with the Singapore Chartered Accountant designation are highly competent. It is designed to develop future business leaders.

To uphold the high standards necessary to achieve the vision of developing Singapore as the leading global accountancy hub, registration of Chartered Accountants to be Public Accountants in Singapore and Reciprocal Membership Agreements (RMAs) are subject to periodic review.

The Applied Business Analytics major trains students with the valuable skill to interface between data scientists and senior management, or to qualify for top graduate business analytics programmes globally.

With computing power increasingly available, decision-making has evolved to rely more heavily on data at all levels within organisations. Business graduates need to be more numerate and analytical, with expertise in collecting and extracting actionable intelligence from data.

This major builds on the core business knowledge all BBA students acquire and develops strong contextual management understanding. Graduates function well as data-savvy business consultants, either internally for their own organisations or externally for clients.

Please visit our public interest group for more details.

The Business Economics major offers holistic training in business economics through distinct alternative pathways from the second to the fourth year. To maximise synergies, the curriculum uses multiple courses from the Departments of Economics, Analytics & Operations, and Marketing.

This major offers a coherent path for BBA students seeking careers in management or economic consulting, finance, or general management. It develops talent who are well versed in business and management practices whilst being strongly proficient in economics.

Who should take it: BBA students pursuing careers in management or economic consulting

The finance major aims to produce ethical, high quality and job-ready finance professionals with a global mind-set for the finance industry. This is achieved through the following dimensions: industry relevance, ethics, breadth, rigour, and cross discipline. The finance major is a Certified Financial Analyst (CFA) programme partner, meeting the CFA programme curriculum requirements which are updated frequently for industry relevance.

The major involves many distinguished industry professionals as adjunct professors and invited speakers, bringing to the classroom the latest know how and innovations in the industry. Other than internships, students complete a field service project with a company in the industry which involves solving real business problems faced by the company. Students take part and perform well in finance competitions organised by the industry. The finance major takes the development of ethics very seriously. All students go through an ethics workshop based on the CFA Institute Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct. The ethics dimension is often revisited in every finance course through discussions and case studies. Students are held to the highest standard of ethics requirement, with particular emphasis on non-plagiarism, honesty in assessment-related work, and professionalism in project work.

The major addresses the need for breadth through its three required finance courses: FIN3701 Corporate Finance, FIN3702 Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management and FIN3703 Financial Markets. This ensures that students know the basic workings in the various sectors within the finance industry. It addresses the need for rigour through its many elective subjects ranging from the area of asset management, to personal finance, banking and business finance. Students may package their electives freely to develop all rounded rigor or specialized rigor for a particular finance career.

The finance major integrates well with other majors in the Business School producing not just finance specialists but balanced business professionals with strength in leadership and technology. Students have enough elective courses to take another major such as marketing, decision science and management. The case studies and projects in the finance courses often require analysis in these other majors as well. The major supports overseas student exchange programme stimulating the development of global mind-set and perspectives in finance.

The finance major employs the latest and best pedagogy for education including blended learning. Some courses are conducted in our trading and computer lab complete with industry software such as Bloomberg and MSCI Barra, producing job-ready graduates. The major enjoys the support of its numerous enthusiastic and dedicated alumni. They regularly come back for networking sessions with undergraduates and provide mentorship and career guidance. This adds to the vibrancy and colourful learning experience in the major.

The Innovation and Entrepreneurship major aims to equip our students to become visionaries and change makers to lead the transformation of Singapore businesses into the future economy. The pace of innovation means the industries our students enter will drastically transform over the course of their careers. Economic growth will come from leaders who understand the organisational and business challenges inherent in these changes and are comfortable managing an uncertain environment.

This major will furnish our students with broad theoretical lenses to lead change effectively, whether in an entrepreneurial venture or a large multinational corporation. Partnered with rich experiential projects and courses, students will enter the workplace comfortably applying these theories with the broader skills developed in the BBA programme.

This major will interest a broad cross-section of BBA students, from those planning specific careers in management consulting or entrepreneurship to those who want to be well-equipped for the dynamic industrial environment.

Leadership is the linchpin in organisations and teams. By understanding leadership, students will place themselves in a central node of influence to inspire people, create organisational outcomes, and ultimately realize the full potential of human capital.

To keep the major current and relevant, keen attention will be paid to the shifting business landscape that forms the backdrop to leadership, for instance, trends on human resource (HR) big data analytics, controversial new organisational structures, and the impact of technology and globalization. These will be addressed in advanced seminar classes in collaboration with other departments, where we probe the evolving role of leadership and how to lead organisations to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world. At the same time, Human Capital Management will proactively address the changes in the environment, especially on its horizontal and vertical alignment with strategy and culture to obtain sustainable competitive advantage for the firm and people.

Students who pursue this major can look forward to careers in management consulting, HR consulting, organisational development, HR generalist/specialist, and HR policymaking.

Marketing, more than any other business function, deals with customers. It is also the revenue-generating department in any organisation.

Marketing is about managing profitable customer relationships by satisfying customer needs better than the competition, thus creating superior value for customers. Hence, students majoring in Marketing should understand not only the company and its customers, but also the competition in the context of the political, economic, socioeconomic, and technological environment to identify opportunities and harness them through well-thought-out product, pricing, distribution and promotion strategies to bring value not only for the customers but also to the company.

As such, marketing courses are developed and offered at various stages of the curriculum to enhance learning progression and outcomes consistent with what Marketing is. All students begin with learning Principles of Marketing (MKT1705) in their first year. The second marketing course (MKT3701 – Marketing Strategy: Analysis and Practice) builds on the principles by sharpening students’ analytical proclivity and going in-depth in key topics, especially from a managerial and strategic perspective. The Consumer Behaviour (MKT3702) course drills deep into understanding customers – the fundamental premise of marketing; specifically, how consumers affect business practices and also how marketers influence them. These courses are the building blocks upon which electives are offered.

Our electives cover comprehensively the strategies involving what is often termed the marketing mix – product and brand, pricing, retailing and promotion. As Singapore is a service economy, our curriculum also offers a Services Marketing course to equip students for this important sector.

Beyond these marketing mix courses, we keep current with offerings concerning Digital Marketing as well as Customer Relationship Management, among others. As data analytics is an important driver in today’s businesses, we offer MKT3722 Research for Marketing Insights as well as MKT4812 Marketing Analytics to train Marketing majors in understanding the quantitative bases underlying the strategies.

Managing business operations effectively is crucial to the competitive advantage of any organisation. This major is not only designed for students who are keen to venture into the functional area of operations, logistics or supply chain management, but also for anyone who will play an effective role in contributing to the competitiveness of any organisation regardless of industry sectors. Building upon the BBA core course DAO2703 Operations and Technology Management, students are equipped with foundational knowledge in supply chain management and service operations, which are applicable to both manufacturing and service industries.

Electives relating to project management, information management and business analytics further provide students with essential knowledge and skills needed for sound decision making and effective management of business processes. Given growing environmental concerns, sustainable operations management becomes a highly relevant and hence included topic.

This major offers an elective project course to provide students with hands-on experience in addressing issues and resolving challenges in the operations and supply chain domain. Please visit our public interest group for more details.

The Real Estate major trains real estate professionals to create and manage wealth in the context of the built environment. Recognising that Real Estate is Space and Money over Time, this major is unique in providing an explicit link and interface between the spatial features of Real Estate and its financial attributes. Real Estate graduates play key roles in the development of the built environment as well as in the advancement of the quality of urban living through the transformation and management of real estate resources.