But coming back to the general populace, I guess the problem lies in the age-old belief that if you study engineering, you will most probably end up in a science/technical sort of job and if you study business and economics, you’re probably going for maanagement/banking finance sort of jobs.

However, I believe the bigger problem is the way society is structured as to place a HUGE emphasis on grades which brings us to the problem you highlighted on students picking easy mods rather than mods they’re really interested in.

The Singapore workforce is very competitive and with employers placing a huge emphasis on academic merits rather than innovations done at school, it’ll be a tough challenge for the university (or anyone for that matter) to change society’s mindset.

By the way, I’m making a huge guess here but NUS may also be at fault in a way. Reason why business students try to avoid engineering/science modules is because some of these modules are so technical that students with a background in science will have a huge added advantage compared to those who don’t. Hence, some of these more bold and daring arts students end up suffering not because they didn’t study hard but because the module was conducted with the assumption that most students already had some sort of basic knowledge in the subject matter.

Your observation is true in a sense. As I often lament in NUS, we have too many engineers wanting to be business people but not business people who can reverse the process.

USP is quite good at that