overloading and optionality

posted feb 2025

One of the most interesting features of undergraduate education at NUS is the freedom it provides.

To me, the most unique freedom¹ is in how students have control over how many courses they want to take each semester. By default, students take 20 credits (5 courses) each semester, but you can choose to “overload” and take as many courses as you can tetris into your timetable.² This is ultimately subject to departmental approval, but especially at the School of Computing (SoC), approvals are generous.³ I know for a fact that SoC has given approvals for students to take more than 50 credits in a semester.

---

Anyhow, I recently heard this (rather benign) rumour about myself that I “overloaded like crazy to graduate super early”, which apparently sparked a lot of discussion amongst <people_who_were_talking_about_me>. I thought that there’s something in that worth clarifying:

I didn’t overload in order to graduate early. I overloaded to give myself options, including the option to graduate early, which I eventually happened to take.

It’s true that if you want to graduate early, then you will have to overload. However, one should not make the inverse error of thinking that if you don’t want to graduate early, then you should not overload.

---

overloading giveth optionality

Overloading gives future-you the option to:

1. overload more
   (appeal: “I achieved X GPA with Y credits and Z commitments, clearly I can handle Y+N credits”)
2. underload
   (appeal: “I already have X credits in my degree, clearly I can graduate on time even if I take Y credits this semester”)
3. secure popular courses
   (in course registration, your priority score weights seniority by a multiplicative factor. “seniority” is determined by how many credits you have)
4. drop courses you don’t like
   (in NUS, you can drop courses without affecting your GPA up until halfway through the semester, which is a trivial button-click if you have >18 credits after the drop. by overloading at the start of the semester, you can “try out” a bunch of courses and choose to keep the ones you like)
5. do research (officially⁴) earlier
   (in SoC, UROP requires 60 units completed before you start, which is achievable by the end of Y1S2 if you overload. FYP requires 112 units completed before you start. this might be extra useful for double degree students who may have to do 2 dissertations, since the integrated thesis was deprecated)
6. do the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme earlier
   (NOC requires 70 units at the point of departure, which is achievable by the end of Y1S2 if you overload (especially so if you have some exemptions / pre-u course credit))
7. do credit-bearing internships earlier
   (the credit-bearing internships in SoC require 70 units completed before you start, which is achievable by the end of Y1S2 if you overload. this frees up future summers got other things you might want to do, which could include other internships that may not fit within the department’s requirements)
8. more easily secure grad courses (?)
   (in SoC, grad courses can only be taken through appeals. at least once I was told that I would be allowed to take a course since they saw “on the system” that I was “Year 4 already” (I was not))
9. do internships that want you to graduate soon
   (some companies want interns to be graduating soon, since their internship programme is a pipeline for full-time hires and they only do headcount planning 1 year in advance. companies can check if this is true by sending a request to NUS, which will compute your “expected graduation date” based on the assumption that you take 20 units per semester for all future semesters)
10. take it easy in later semesters / graduate early
    (you never know when some reason might crop up⁵ that makes you want to do less courses or graduate early. maybe you want to take a semester off to do a startup, or maybe you want to graduate early to start working)

A common misconception is that overloading earlier “gives you less space” to do specific courses in future semesters. This is not true – while you need a minimum of 160 credits to graduate, there is no maximum number of credits you can take.

---

overloading taketh optionality

That said, even if you can handle the workload and excel with a higher course load, you may not want to, since you have less optionality in “doing random things”⁶ during the semester.

That is, you will have less opportunity to get bored during the semester, and boredom begets creativity and exploration.

One way to fight this is to promise yourself that you’ll drop all courses that don’t meet some K “enjoyment bar” by some point in the semester. But this promise is harder to keep than one might expect: as your sunk cost increases, K magically decreases :)

---

have your cake and eat it

Almost all the optionality gains from overloading listed above are actually gains from a symptom of overloading: having more credits than expected at your current semester.

While overloading is the most direct way to achieve this, you can still accumulate credits with relative impunity by:

• doing CP2106 Orbital in your first summer, even if you’re not going to spend that much time on it (just make some web app)
• taking some CS/CU (pass/fail) courses during the semester, like those organised by the career office (CFG*)
• claiming credit for an internship you do during your first summer through CFG2101 (assuming you aren’t yet eligible for your department’s internship course)
• taking exemption tests for courses before you begin university (e.g. the Programming Methodology 1 test, or the Calculus / Linear Algebra tests offered to Engineering students)
• taking courses offered for returning National Servicemen in the summer before you matriculate, which include some core CS courses as well as some general education courses through FASSTrack⁷

The disadvantage of doing this is that you might feel like you’re “wasting” your time in university by doing these “free courses”. I would agree except for the fact that, once again, there is no maximum number of credits you can take in your degree. You can accumulate an extra semester worth of “free credits” early on to reap the benefits, and then still complete 160 credits of hardcore content courses

The only benefit that actually requires overloading is the ability to drop courses you dislike mid-semester. However, if you’re willing to overload at the start of the semester, and force yourself to only keep the 20 credits of courses you enjoy the most, you can still get a good chunk of the benefits of overloading while incurring far less cost.