If you’re applying to universities overseas, you already know you need passion projects and supercurriculars. In this article, we will cover what actually works from here: what to do, where to find it, and how to think about building a profile that universities notice.
What Are Universities Actually Looking For?
Let’s clear something up first. Universities aren’t hunting for the most impressive thing you’ve ever done. They want genuine curiosity and follow-through. Those are actually two different things, and you need both.
Your supercurricular doesn’t need to win a national competition or get written up anywhere. What it needs:
Did you actually care? Admissions readers can smell performative interest from miles away. They read thousands of apps a year. If you did something because it looked good and not because you were genuinely interested, that tends to show.
What happened along the way? What did you try? What flopped? What did you figure out? The process matters as much as the result — sometimes more.
Did you go deep? One thing you stuck with for 18 months beats five things you dabbled in. Every time.
Can you talk about it as yourself? In interviews, you’ll be asked to just… talk about what you did. If you can’t do that naturally, that’s a problem.
Keep these in mind as you read the rest. They’re the filter everything else runs through.
The Real Picture in Singapore
Look, the constraints are real and it’s worth naming them.
The school system here is brutal. O-Levels, A-Levels, the IB — your calendar is genuinely packed, especially in Sec 3/4 and JC1. A lot of parents are understandably nervous about anything that eats into study time. And when you compare yourself to American students who seem to have summer research internships and six-week service programmes lined up, it can feel like you’re working with less.
But here’s what actually gets missed in this conversation: Singapore is a legitimately great place to do interesting work.
You’re in one of the most connected cities in the world. Government infrastructure is world-class and actually functional. You’ve got a multilingual population, active funding for youth innovation, and you’re sitting right next to Southeast Asian markets full of genuinely unsolved problems. The raw material for good supercurriculars is everywhere — most students just haven’t been told where to look.
Passion Projects vs. Supercurriculars — Do You Need Both?
People use “passion project” and “supercurricular” interchangeably a lot, and that’s fine. But they do point at slightly different things, and it’s worth knowing the difference.
When people say passion project, they usually mean something self-initiated. You saw a problem, you decided to do something about it, and you saw it through — no teacher told you to, no programme required it. Community initiatives, startups, independent research, creative work. These are the things that power personal statements.
When people say supercurricular, they usually mean structured intellectual engagement beyond your syllabus — competitions, university courses, subject-specific internships, advanced reading. These signal that your interest in a subject is real and self-directed. UK universities especially are obsessed with this. An Oxford tutor interviewing you for Economics wants to know that you’ve actually been thinking about economics outside class, not just studying for exams.
In practice, the strongest applications have both. Someone applying to read Law at Oxford might have a supercurricular trail — they did a mooting competition, took a jurisprudence course online, wrote a policy brief on criminal justice reform — and a passion project running alongside it, like a prison rehabilitation initiative they’d been running for a year. Together those tell a coherent story. Separately they’d each be weaker.
So yes, you want both. The rest of this guide covers both.
Passion Projects That Work in Singapore
1. Independent Research
This is probably the single most well-regarded type of supercurricular for competitive university applications. The key word is independent — you came up with the question, you figured out how to answer it, and you actually produced something.
NUS’s Research@HS and NTU’s Research Mentorship Programme both let secondary school and JC students work with faculty. They’re selective, but absolutely worth applying to. A-STAR’s Science Mentorship Programme is another route if you’re science-leaning.
But if you don’t get in — and many serious students don’t — you can absolutely do independent research anyway. You don’t need a lab. Here’s what that actually looks like when done well:
- A student interested in economics surveys 80 hawker stall owners across three estates about what’s driving closures. She codes the responses, writes a 5,000-word report, and argues that rental structure matters more than footfall. That’s real research.
- A student interested in public health pulls CPF data from Singapore’s open data portal and analyses how healthcare utilisation varies by housing type.
- A student interested in literature does a close reading of four decades of Singaporean short fiction and builds an argument about how racial representation has shifted since the 1980s.
The thing you produce at the end matters. Aim for something written — a report, a paper, even a heavily annotated dataset — something you can actually share and talk through in an interview.
2. Community Projects With Real Ownership
Turning up to volunteer at events doesn’t cut it. What universities want — and what genuinely interesting supercurriculars look like — is: you spotted a problem, you built a response to it, and you were still there months later.
Singapore has no shortage of real needs. Elderly residents in rental blocks who are isolated. Kids from lower-income families with no access to enrichment. Migrant workers who need language support or just connection. These aren’t abstract problems — they’re in your city.
The difference between “CCA that looks good on a form” and a real passion project is ownership. Did you start this? Did you bring other people in? When your first approach didn’t work, did you change it? Were you still involved six months later?
VWOs are a reasonable starting point. But go in with a specific problem you’re trying to solve, not just a general willingness to help. Track what happens. Write it down.
3. Starting Something
A publication. A small business. A podcast. A design studio. Starting something from scratch and keeping it going signals initiative in a way that’s immediately legible to any admissions reader.
Singapore’s actually decent for this. Enterprise Singapore and school-linked incubators offer real funding and mentorship. And the barrier to getting something off the ground is low — Shopify, Substack, and similar platforms mean you can build something real without significant money or institutional backing.
Some things Singaporean students have actually done: launched a Substack covering local urban development that hit several hundred subscribers; started a sustainable fashion resale business; built a tutoring matching service for migrant worker families; produced a short documentary about wet market vendors.
None of those had big budgets. None needed school permission. They needed someone to actually start.
4. Tech and Engineering Projects
If computing, engineering, or applied science is your thing, Singapore hands you genuinely interesting problems to work on — smart city infrastructure, healthcare systems, food supply chains, urban farming.
The key distinction is: build something real, not a portfolio of completed tutorials. Real means it solves a problem that actually matters to someone. A scheduling tool for a community centre. A dashboard that tracks hawker centre hygiene ratings. An app that helps elderly residents navigate Singpass. A model trained on HDB resale data that surfaces pricing anomalies.
Open-source contributions also count — especially if you can explain specifically what you contributed, why you did it, and what you learned from the codebase.
5. Writing and Intellectual Work
This is massively underused by Singaporean students. Probably because it feels less “concrete” than building an app or running a programme. But for humanities-leaning universities especially, a student who thinks hard about things and writes well is exactly what they’re looking for.
The trick is specificity. Not a general blog — something with a clear intellectual focus. A student who writes monthly analyses of specific urban planning decisions in Singapore. Someone who publishes fortnightly commentary on Southeast Asian politics with actual arguments. Someone who writes about AI ethics and cites real papers. That’s the kind of thing that makes an admissions tutor sit up.
Supercurriculars: Going Beyond Your Syllabus
This matters most for UK applications, but it’s relevant everywhere. Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL — they all want the same thing: evidence that your passion for a subject is real, not just manufactured by good teaching.
1. Academic Competitions
Competitions do two things. They push you into material well beyond what’s on your syllabus, and a strong result gives admissions offices something concrete. But even if you don’t place, the preparation itself — weeks of grinding through problems you can’t immediately solve — is worth talking about. The struggle is the point.
Science and Maths
- Singapore Mathematical Olympiad (SMO) — Junior, Senior, and Open divisions. Strong performance opens the door to IMO selection.
- Singapore Physics Olympiad (SPhO) and Singapore Chemistry Olympiad (SChO) — pathways to IPhO and IChO.
- Singapore Biology Olympiad (SBO) — for life sciences students.
- Singapore Science and Engineering Fair (SSEF) — if your independent research project is strong, enter this. The best projects go on to the international Regeneron ISEF.
- A-STAR Science Award — not a competition exactly, but worth knowing about if you’ve got a strong research record.
Humanities and Social Sciences
- John Locke Essay Competition — one of the most respected international competitions for humanities students, full stop. Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology, Law. UK universities know it well, and a commendation or above genuinely moves the needle.
- ESS Economics Essay Competition — solid local option for economics students.
- Model United Nations (MUN) — widely available in Singapore. Good for skills, but treat it as one part of a broader profile, not the centrepiece.
- NUS Geography Challenge — for human or physical geography students.
- Singapore History Prize Youth Category — worth it if history is genuinely your thing.
Writing and Literature
- Scholastic Art & Writing Awards — well-recognised, especially for US applications.
- School-level essay competitions that feed national ones — check your school’s academic calendar.
Computing and Engineering
- National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) — Singapore’s main computing competition. Pathway to the IOI.
- Google Summer of Code — for students ready to contribute to actual open-source projects.
One thing worth saying: you don’t need a medal for competitions to be valuable on your application. Universities know Olympiad medals are rare. What matters is that you engaged seriously — that you trained, struggled, and kept going. Don’t sit out because you’re worried about not winning.
2. University-Level Courses
Taking a uni-level course before you apply is one of the clearest ways to show your interest in a subject is genuine. It also means that in an interview, when someone asks you a concept question, you actually know what you’re talking about.
Online (free or cheap, doable from Singapore):
- MIT OpenCourseWare — real MIT course materials, completely free. No certificate, but if you’re doing it to learn rather than to have something to show, this is hard to beat.
- Coursera and edX — Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Michigan. The certificate is nice but not essential. The learning is the point.
- Khan Academy — good for building solid foundations before you tackle harder material.
- Brilliant.org — particularly strong for maths and CS, problem-first approach.
By subject:
Economics / Social Sciences: Yale’s Financial Markets on Coursera (Robert Shiller teaches it), MIT’s 14.01 Microeconomics on OpenCourseWare, Princeton’s Sociology of Global Inequality on Coursera.
Maths: MIT 18.01 Calculus and 18.06 Linear Algebra on OpenCourseWare are genuinely university-level. 3Blue1Brown’s Essence of Linear Algebra on YouTube is a brilliant companion — watch it first or alongside.
Computer Science: Harvard CS50 on edX is the gold standard entry point. Stanford CS221 and MIT 6.006 are good next steps when you’re ready for more.
Biology / Medicine: MIT 7.012 Introduction to Biology on OpenCourseWare. For medicine-interested students, Johns Hopkins public health courses on Coursera are worth a look.
History / Humanities: Open Yale Courses has a solid range. Oxford’s online short courses are paid but well-regarded.
Law: Yale’s Constitution and Criminal Law on Coursera, Harvard’s CopyrightX on edX. Reading actual case law alongside these is even more valuable than the course itself.
In Singapore:
- NUS and NTU both run summer programmes and enrichment courses for pre-university students.
- Some JCs have arrangements where advanced students can sit in on introductory university modules — worth asking a teacher about.
3. Subject-Specific Internships
An internship only counts as a supercurricular if it’s genuinely relevant to what you want to study. Two weeks of admin at your parent’s company tells no one anything useful. But a placement where you were doing actual work — analysing data, contributing to a real project, writing something that got used — that’s worth including and talking about in detail.
Finding these takes some nerve. But they exist.
Science and medicine: Email A-STAR research institutes directly. Lots of PIs will take on motivated students for short attachments in the June or December holidays — they just don’t advertise it. Be specific: which lab, which research, why you. Attach a brief statement of interest. Follow up once if you don’t hear back.
Economics, finance, public policy: MAS, MTI, and other agencies occasionally run placements for pre-university students. Think tanks like the Institute of Policy Studies and RSIS sometimes take informal interns too. Cold email. Be specific. Follow up.
Law: Formal internships at this stage are difficult. But plenty of senior lawyers will have a one-hour conversation with a genuinely curious student. Go in with prepared questions. Write up what you learned afterwards. That conversation is worth more than a week of photocopying.
Arts and media: Production companies, galleries, journalism outlets, design studios — far more approachable than large companies. Come with a specific ask, not a generic “I’d like an internship.” Something like “I’d like to shadow your editorial team for three days during production of X” lands completely differently.
4. Writing: Blogs, Research Papers, Policy Briefs
Writing that demonstrates real subject knowledge is one of the most underrated supercurriculars going. It’s free, it’s entirely yours, and it gets stronger the longer you keep at it.
A subject-specific blog or Substack. Not a personal diary. A focused intellectual project with a clear lens. Someone interested in urban planning writing monthly analyses of specific decisions in Singapore. Someone interested in IR publishing commentary on Southeast Asian politics every fortnight. Someone interested in environmental science writing about regional ecosystems with reference to actual papers. That’s the kind of thing that catches attention.
A research paper. Doesn’t need to be published to matter. A well-argued 4,000–8,000 word paper on a specific question — written over several months, actually revised — demonstrates exactly the intellectual rigour universities are looking for. If it’s genuinely good, try submitting it somewhere. Many undergraduate journals accept secondary school submissions.
A policy brief. For students interested in public policy, economics, or law, this format is excellent — structured, evidence-based, applied to something real. Write one on a specific Singapore question: housing affordability, CPF reform, education access. Do it well and it becomes a strong talking point in any interview.
5. Serious Reading
This is the hardest supercurricular to demonstrate and the easiest to fake — which is exactly why doing it genuinely makes you stand out.
“I read widely” isn’t enough. What you’re going for is: engaged with ideas beyond your syllabus, formed actual opinions, can talk about where you agree and disagree with what you’ve read. The reading is the input. The thinking is what matters.
Some places to start:
Economics: Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics, Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox, Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. For something more technical, Krugman’s International Economics goes well beyond A-Level.
Politics / IR: Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (it’s genuinely readable, and comes up in more IR interviews than you’d expect), Kishore Mahbubani’s Has the West Lost It? for a Singapore-proximate take.
Law: Tom Bingham’s The Rule of Law — read this before applying to law anywhere. Jonathan Herring’s Criminal Law: Text, Cases, and Materials gives you a real taste of what law school reading is actually like.
Biology / Medicine: Ridley’s Genome, Mukherjee’s The Gene and The Emperor of All Maladies. For something more technical, Alberts et al.’s Molecular Biology of the Cell is the standard university textbook.
Maths: Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem for narrative, Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology for thinking about what maths actually is. Spivak’s Calculus for a genuine challenge — it’s a university-level text that rewards real effort.
Philosophy: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy is the classic starting point. Plato’s early dialogues — Euthyphro, Meno, Republic Book I — are shorter than you’d expect and come up constantly in Oxford interviews.
History: Primary sources matter as much as secondary ones. If Singapore history is your thing, the transcripts of the 1955–1963 constitutional negotiations are publicly available and far more interesting than any textbook account. For global history, E.H. Carr’s What Is History? is a short, sharp intro to historiography.
Whatever you read: take notes. Write short responses. Actually form opinions. The student who says “I found Banerjee and Duflo’s RCT methodology convincing in narrow contexts but too limited for structural problems — and here’s why” is a completely different interview candidate from the one who says “I’ve read quite a bit about development economics.”
Practical Stuff: How to Actually Get Moving
Start earlier than feels necessary. The end of Sec 3 or start of JC1 is the sweet spot — you’ve got 12–18 months before you’re writing your personal statement. You want genuine development to talk about, not a last-minute sprint that reads like a last-minute sprint.
Pick something you’d talk about even if it weren’t on your application. Interviews will test this. If you chose a passion project or supercurricular because it sounded good rather than because you actually cared, that becomes obvious fast.
Write things down as you go. Not for anyone else — for future you. What did you try? What didn’t work? What did you change and why? That log becomes your raw material for essays and interviews. It’s nearly impossible to reconstruct honestly six months later.
Find a mentor. Doesn’t need to be a professor. A teacher, a family friend in a relevant field, someone you cold-emailed whose work you respect. A mentor keeps you honest, offers feedback, and often opens doors you didn’t know were there.
Don’t optimise for prestige. A student who spent a year helping elderly residents in their HDB block learn to video-call their grandchildren — and who can actually articulate what that taught them about technology, isolation, and connection — beats a student who squeezed a three-week “research internship” onto their CV and can barely talk about what they did.
The Questions We Hear Most
“My parents think I should just focus on my grades.” Completely understandable tension. The conversation that tends to help: Yale, Princeton, UCL — none of them are just looking for straight A’s. Your results get you through the first filter. Everything else is what separates you from the other students who also got straight A’s.
“I don’t have any connections.” Most good supercurriculars don’t start with connections. They start with a specific idea, a cold email, and being willing to hear no a few times before someone says yes. Singapore is genuinely small — whoever you’re trying to reach is almost never more than two or three degrees away.
“I don’t know what I’m passionate about.” More common than anyone admits, and completely fine. Start paying attention to what makes you frustrated, confused, or curious. What problems do you keep noticing that no one seems to be fixing? What do you find yourself reading about when you have other things to do? Passion isn’t always a sudden thing — often it’s just a slow accumulation of the same kinds of questions until you realise they all connect.
One Last Thing
The Singaporean students who get into competitive universities aren’t the ones who found the most prestigious-sounding programme to attach their name to. They’re the ones who did something real, actually cared about it, learned from it, and can talk about it like they mean it.
Singapore gives you more to work with than most students here realise. Real problems. Real communities. Real ideas worth pursuing. Your job is finding the one that genuinely belongs to you — and then actually doing it.
If you want help figuring out what that looks like for your specific interests and where you’re applying, that’s exactly what we do.
How We Help You Build a Standout Profile
We don’t just provide a list of activities; we act as architects for your unique journey. Our services include:
- Bespoke Project Incubation: Brainstorming and launching a passion project that solves real-world problems in Singapore.
- Academic Roadmapping: A curated 12–18 month timeline of Olympiads, top-tier essay competitions, and university-level courses.
- Research Mentorship: Guiding you through independent research and data analysis to produce interview-ready reports.
- Narrative Coaching: Crafting a coherent story for your Personal Statement and prepping you for rigorous university interviews.
Reach us at enquiries@qeducation.sg or book a consultation through our website.
