A direct line to Singapore

January 31, 2023

With the Maximilian Graf Montgelas Fellowship, TUM administrative staff have the opportunity to explore these issues up close. Online editor Andreas Schmidt from the Corporate Communications Center paid a visit to the TUM Asia campus in Singapore. Since 2002 it has also been the home of TUM Asia, the first overseas campus of a German university. The morning after the day-long journey to Singapore, I take the ultramodern and always reliable underground train to the University City in the south-west of the city. Along with the country’s two major universities, the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, this is also home to the Singapore Institute of Technology and TUM Asia.

What makes universities in other countries tick – and what can we learn from them? With the Maximilian Graf Montgelas Fellowship, TUM administrative staff have the opportunity to explore these issues up close. Online editor Andreas Schmidt from the Corporate Communications Center paid a visit to the TUM Asia campus in Singapore.

Singapore is quite an experience: a high-tech, culturally diverse city state with a tropical climate and vegetation to match – sometimes cultivated on the 50th floor of a highrise complex. Since 2002 it has also been the home of TUM Asia, the first overseas campus of a German university. With funding from a TUM Montgelas Fellowship I had the opportunity to visit this megacity in September 2022 and, of course, to get to know the work of my colleagues there.

The morning after the day-long journey to Singapore, I take the ultramodern and always reliable underground train to the University City in the south-west of the city. Along with the country’s two major universities, the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, this is also home to the Singapore Institute of Technology and TUM Asia.

Passing palm trees and food courts, I soon reach the rear section of the campus where the nerve center  of our overseas site is located on an office floor.. All of the employees, from curriculum developers to managers, have their offices here. As I soon observe during the first working days of my visit, this ensures that feedback from student advisers or digital communication channels is routed directly to the professors responsible for the course programs – practically as a call to action.