Time was when weighing up your tertiary education options meant simply cherry-picking the courses you were most interested in studying. Decision made, you could begin pin-pointing the college or university whose academic ranking or balance of curricular excellence and extra-curricular engagements best met your unique needs.
With exhaustive information about even the most esoteric topic now instantly accessible online, few millennial students want to tie themselves down to a single subject. The fact that 21st Century employers are chasing applicants with more intellectual strings to their bows more than validates this thinking. While single-subject courses that may still promise a head start on the career front remain popular, they may not be very varied or stimulating. They may be less likely to help students unlock the extraordinarily enriching experiences that university opens up for them.
At HKUST, we understand that courses which leave students more fully rounded after they graduate than they were when they first entered our classrooms are the most fulfilling educational choices of them all. The University’s flexible attitude to student- and future employee-friendliness has won us more than our fair share of global admirers. In this, our 30th anniversary year, the highly regarded QS Top 50 Under 50 University Ranking for 2021 benchmarked HKUST as its World’s No. 2 Young University.
Perhaps the most persuasive argument for adding us to students’ tertiary education shopping list is that we won’t require them to commit to a major until the second or third term. As a result, students will have plenty of time and opportunity to mix and match major and minor/extended major that may be totally unrelated. Best of all, should they feel they’ve made a wrong choice and wish to rectify it, the university is very receptive to student requests for changes in academic direction. We also offer students’ the options of taking double or triple majors covering vastly different disciplines and allowing students to enrol in dual degrees.
World's first triple degree and customizable major program
Having correctly anticipated students’ demand for more cross-disciplinary knowledge, HKUST has been busy tailoring interdisciplinary, joint schools and even joint university programs to match. One end result has been collaborations with the University of Southern California and the University of Bocconi and the creation of the world’s first triple degree, joint-university program – World Bachelor of Business.
In striving to nurture emerging talents whose eyes are set on loftier academic goals, we’ve also pioneered a truly customizable Individualized Interdisciplinary Major – offering students the freedom to tailor degree courses covering several cross-disciplinary programs.
We continue to pioneer in enhancing students' skills with more Extended Majors
Starting last year, the University broke still more new ground with a completely new kind of academic framework – the Extended Major. The new option allows students to add an additional major to their first and even includes a genuinely far-sighted Artificial Intelligence course module.
2021 has seen us add yet another option to our Extended Major framework in the form of Digital Media and Creative Arts module. Offering practically unlimited scope to integrate both topics across an interdisciplinary framework, the course is ideal for anyone wishing to complement their technical computing and media knowledge with useful insights into artistic fields such as computer games and animation. Other possible specializations open to those taking this course include special effects, sound, wireless and mobile media, internet application and interactive installations.
With many people’s lives on hold since the start of the pandemic, educators worldwide are doing everything possible to help future leaders sharpen their edge in the increasingly competitive graduate job market. HKUST’s solution is to encourage you to take a multi-faceted course that will both broaden your knowledge base and nurture a cross-disciplinary mindset.
In moving forwards, we continue to place paramount importance on greater flexibility in the integration and implementation of different disciplines. In doing so, we remain perfectly placed to equip forward-thinking students like yourself with a measurable edge in tomorrow’s ever-more exciting but challenging world.
register now
Eager to learn more about how HKUST’s expanding menu of cross-disciplinary options will benefit you in your university studies and professional career? Then register for our Virtual Information Day and get set to find out all you need to know from our professors, admissions officers and current students!
| Time: | 11:00 am to 8:00 pm |
| Date: | 25 September, 2021 (Sat) |
