Since January 2000, the University Scholars Programme, a highly selective honors programme at the National University of Singapore, has supported the Victorian Web, providing its primary home and funding The Victorian Web Books section and other ongoing projects.
The University Scholars Programme, which is intended to produce venturesome, creative leaders, draws upon talented and promising students from six separate faculties and schools at the National University of Singapore -- the Arts and Social Sciences, Science, Engineering, Business, Computing and Design and Environment; it also considers applications from qualified foreign exchange students. Students in the Programme graduate with a degree from their faculty or school, and are referred to as a university scholar during their course of study.
During their first two or three years in the Programme, University Scholars take modules (courses) in their majors plus eight others selected from the following twelve areas of the Programme:
Scholars Programme modules are distinguished by student discussion, independent projects, and emphasis upon introducing students to the culture of individual disciplines. Modules inquire, for example, about what each discipline considers to be evidence, and how each discipline goes about conducting research. A module concerning physics or literature will use case studies to show just what researchers in these fields take to be a proper subject of study, how they go about formulating questions, and what they find acceptable as proof. While introducing students to the way workers in individual disciplines think, modules also inquire about the relations among various fields. How, for example, do historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, and physicists handle stories and story-telling differently? What do they have in common?
These first-tier modules bring together students from different faculties and scholars who would normally not study together. Second-tier or advanced modules, which generally correspond to advanced third- and fourth-year modules, are taught in the individual faculties and schools. Although most of the students in these advanced modules will come from the home faculty, qualified students from other areas may enroll as well. University Scholars are expected to take four such advanced modules, most of which should count towards their major requirements.
Last modified: 13 March 2002