By Jane Ng

THE National University of Singapore (NUS) will set up its sixth overseas college in Beijing in August, adding to its five other colleges in entrepreneurial hubs around the world.

Ten selected undergraduates will spend a year in Beijing, where they will be interns in start-ups, mostly in IT; they will also take up entrepreneurship-related modules part-time at Tsinghua University.

This is NUS' second such foray into China, following the college it set up jointly with Fudan University in Shanghai.

NUS' other overseas colleges are in Sweden, India and the United States - all set up with the aim of giving its undergraduates work experience in entrepreneurial outfits so they can themselves become enterprising and resourceful.

Under this seven-year-old programme, about 150 undergraduates wing overseas every year.

All in their third year, they have to clear two rounds of interviews by NUS and one by the internship company to qualify for the programme.

NUS president Tan Chorh Chuan said the latest overseas college in Beijing dovetails with the university's aim of becoming a leading global university centred in Asia.

China is a fast-growing economic powerhouse, he said, so it is 'critical for our students to gain a strong appreciation of the business culture and to cultivate new networks in China'.

One of the nine participating firms in the Beijing programme is Singapore-based content provider Dream Axis, which will open its first overseas representative office in the Chinese capital in July.

Ms Winne Soh, 25, a co-founder of the start-up, is herself an NUS computer science graduate and an alumnus of the overseas college programme that based her in Shanghai for a year.

She said: 'I know how valuable the programme is in providing students with an entrepreneurial outlook. It was because of what I learnt on it that I dared to take the plunge to set up Dream Axis and venture overseas.'

Professor Teo Chee Leong, the director of NUS Overseas Colleges, described Beijing as being more of a hotbed for start-ups than the other locations.

'A lot of Chinese who went overseas to work with technology companies like Google are now back in Beijing to run their own start-ups, whereas Shanghai is more of a business centre of China.'

NUS is looking into setting up another overseas campus in Europe, and is considering London or Sofia Antipolis in France among other locations, said Prof Teo.

Apart from Beijing, the other five overseas colleges are in Shanghai, Silicon Valley and Philadelphia in the United States, Stockholm in Sweden, and Bangalore in India.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.