SMU students can now graduate with both a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems Management degree from SMU and a master’s degree in IT from Carnegie Mellon University in as quickly as four years. In a first-ever collaboration in infocomm education, SMU and Carnegie Mellon signed an agreement allowing students to spend two years in each university under the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore’s (IDA) National Infocomm Scholarship. Up to 40 scholarships will be offered for this special fast track programme aimed at attracting top students into the area of information technology to strengthen Singapore’s skilled infocomm manpower. Under the conventional route, this would have taken up to five and a half years.

During the first two years, spent at SMU, scholars will enrol with the School of Information Systems, taking a mixture of IT, business and liberal arts foundation courses under its unique business-oriented IT curriculum. Scholars will also do an internship with an infocomm company. They will spend their third year at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, US, where they will continue to fulfill course requirements for the bachelor’s degree. In their fourth year, the scholars will begin the master’s programme in one of seven areas of specialisation ranging from information technology, information systems management, information networking to information security.

“The School of Information Systems at SMU produces a new breed of business-oriented IT professionals who have depth in both business analysis and IT solutions design,” said Professor Steven Miller, Dean of the School of Information Systems. “This combined SMU bachelor’s and Carnegie Mellon master’s programme will produce a very distinctive professional, with deep training in a hybrid of skills, who will be extremely sought after in the new infocomm sector.”