Skip Section A if you've already made up your mind on your Minor and would like to hear about Law students' experiences with Minors. Section A has been written for those among us who wring their hands and chew their lips over every decision. Section B comprises an in-depth interview with two Year 4 students who are on track to completing their Minors, including information on how they feel about their Minors, the most interesting classes they've taken, and more.
Section A: Should I take a Minor? Why should I take a Minor? What happens if I can't complete it? What are the downsides of taking a Minor? Should I just give up
What's the point of taking a Minor?
Honestly, there's no point at all.
Even the most useful of Minors—and I assess the most useful Minor to be a language Minor, since a language Minor at NUS means you take Level 4000 (4k) level language mods and that's a great amount of fluency that you can market yourself with—are only so useful.
Minors don't appear on your diploma, if you were looking for bragging rights. They only appear on your transcript, and even then it's just one line saying that you completed X Minor. This means that you'll have to manually bring up the topic of your Minor.
So if there's no prestige or glory, why take a Minor?
Why do anything?
When do I do a Minor?
And as with all things, there's a deadline for declaring a Minor. At time of writing, you have to declare your Minor by your fifth semester of study. This means Year 3 Semester 1. (Note: A brief search online reveals that you might be able to squeeze your way into taking a Minor by emailing the powers that be, but I don't have personal experience with this.)
If you're a Law student, this means that you have only one chance to decide on your Minor. You can't edit your choice even if you decide in Year 3 Semester 2 that you don't like it. Students from other faculties can experiment with different Minors in their first three years and figure out what they like, but you don't have that luxury. You need to pick one and stick with it.
Note: You can declare a Minor any time you want on EduRec. You can do it in Year 1 Sem 1. You just can't start taking the modules for it until Year 3. Which essentially amounts to not being able to do anything Minor-related until Year 3, which unfortunately is when the window for experimenting with different Minors closes.
This seems tiring and not at all worth it.
Stop that! All the above still shouldn't dissuade you from taking a Minor, for two reasons:
- Minors don't matter and can be dropped any time—if you don't fulfil your Minor's requirements by graduation, the powers that be will just leave it off your transcript; and
- Having an officially-declared Minor rarely comes with any actual administrative perks, unless you're taking a Restricted Minor. What I mean is that you might nto get priority in bidding for mods. For example: I have a Minor in Southeast Asian Studies, but I don't get any more priority in bidding for SE-coded modules. I bid in Round 2 along with every other undergraduate; only SE majors and second majors get priority. (Re: Minors are extremely low-impact, low-consequence, and low-privilege).
So if there isn't a point to taking a Minor, but there's also no point to not taking a Minor… then why not take it? 20 MCs is just five classes.
Conclusion: Do it if you want to. Don't do it if you don't want to.
Section B: A Sit Down With Successful Minor-Takers
Zheng Yang ("ZY") is a Year 4 Environmental Sustainability Minor.
Nadine ("N") is a Year 4 Southeast Asian Studies Minor.
Here's what they have to say about their Minors.
1. What is your Minor, and how did you choose it? Were there other similar Minors that you considered, or did you have your mind made up from the beginning of university?
Z: Environmental Sustainability. I thought it would be relevant with sustainable finance and ESG / corporate governance being important and growing fields in the next 10-20 years in legal practice, especially with not many young lawyers paying attention developing skills and networks in this area.
Beyond that it does permeate every field, so some skills here would surely be helpful. More practically, there were other Minors that would have been much harder to have the prereqs for. And at the very least, I didn’t really see the point in taking Kent Ridge mods just because they were easy to score (of course it helps that my Class of Honours was already stable then), because you still have to spend time going for Kent Ridge classes and studying it anyway…
At the end of the day, it’s academic proof of a relevant skill that’s in your transcript. It has helped me quite a lot actually in obtaining valuable opportunities inside and outside of school, expanding my network and of course understanding the commercial angle behind sustainable finance, sustainable corporate governance etc. I suppose especially for a field like sustainability because it proves you’ve studied this thing more than the buzzwords.
The conventional wisdom is that taking a Minor is just a “fun fact on your transcript”. I think that is only partly true. It’s not a miracle worker, but it gives you plenty to build on.
I also considered a Minor in Management, but I thought ES would have imparted more hard skills/knowledge that would be more easily marketable and which just stands out a bit more. I suppose seeing it from the employer’s perspective helps…
Also, I only found out at the start of Year 3 that law students could take Minors. I had no idea before that.
N: I minor in Southeast Asian Studies. I definitely put much less rational thought into selecting my Minor—I just knew I'd want to Minor in something history-related because I've always wanted to study history at the tertiary level. I ended up pulling the trigger on Southeast Asian Studies because (1) I like the region, and (2) My JC history teacher was a Southeast Asian Studies major and I was abruptly inspired by him while making my decision.
Honestly, my Minor never came up in TC interviews or the like. But I never intended to take the Minor to boost my job prospects. I just wanted to have something interesting on my transcript.
That's not to say that Minoring in Southeast Asian Studies is something abstract and "unpragmatic". The Southeast Asian Studies majors I've met are all doing really interesting things work-wise. I simply mean that I have no pragmatic use for it. Which is fine by me.
2. What are the requirements for satisfying your Minor? Anything beside the 20 MCs requirement?
Z: 20 MCs, which includes 2 compulsory mods.
N: 20 MCs as well, which is inclusive of the compulsory intro mod SE1101E.
3. Name 2 mods you've taken for your Minor that you really enjoyed.
Z: ENV3206 Evaluating Environmental Sustainability — this mod covers corporate governance, sustainability disclosure/reporting rules, regulation and other private sector self-regulation methods, energy/carbon markets, etc. Very finance related but more importantly rules-based. Lawyers have long been asked not just to deal with the law but anything rules-based, such as regulation, industry rules (e.g. SGX rules, MAS directives/guidelines/notes/etc which may be non-binding). I expect that anything rules-based in sustainability will be the same.
GE3210 Natural Resources: Policy & Practice. While I was initially a bit reluctant to take this course because I had already taken another social sciences (FASS) course (because I have a limited selection due to prereqs), this course focused a lot on the political considerations in natural resource issues, which became starkly more relevant as last semester went by. I think that just like how we’ve always been told to have commercial awareness, an understanding of the underlying issues here is just as critical to anything in practice (such as legal work relating to energy / resources, international law, etc).
N: SE3228 The Universe Unraveling: Narratives of War in Indochina. This class only had about nine students, and every week was just coming in to have a very interesting and intimate discussion of the readings. Our prof made sure to curate readings that didn't focus solely on the military aspects of the Vietnam War. I felt very cerebral taking this mod, I loved it, and I'm glad to have taken it. Unfortunately it's not offered any longer so I'm just bragging here.
SE2214 Beyond the Frame: Arts and Lives in Southeast Asia was also great. At this juncture I'd like to highlight that there are at least three (3) SE-coded mods which have overseas trips. SE2214 and SE2224 have trips to Yogyakarta (which is where I went) and Bali and are offered in Semester 1. One of our very own Justified alumni actually took SE2224 and wrote an article about her experience. SE3224 has a trip to Bangkok, I believe, and it's offered in Semester 2. SE2214 is about Javanese art forms, and it was six weeks of lecture leading up to a trip to Yogyakarta during Recess Week. It was amazing. Can't recommend it enough.
4. Have you taken Kent Ridge mods aside from the ones to fulfil your Minor? Which ones?
Z: I only took Spanish 7. I really only had space for 2 Kent Ridge mods after the Minor, because I did non-law modules on exchange too.
N: I'm currently taking HY2260 History and Popular Culture, but most of my non-Law mods have been SE-coded mods. Oh, and I'm taking Vietnamese 2 this semester, although it does count for my Minor. I love studying Vietnamese. In general, I highly recommend language mods!
5. Should law students take Minors?
Z: Absolutely, if there’s something relevant to your career. Unless your Class of Honours is a consideration (I’ve only gotten B+s — median — for all my Minor mods because they’re mostly 3ks and quite hard to do excellently without prior grounding), I really don’t understand why taking fluff KR mods is even a thing. Nobody learns anything in almost all the courses. Nobody intends to learn anything from them.
We might as well have the option to graduate early by cramming Y3 and graduate without honours. As I mentioned, Minors are probably the best (and for us, only, lol) way to understand the wider context behind any area of legal practice.
But I think a huge caveat is that there aren’t that many Minors that are super relevant or possible to do due to heavy prerequisite requirements. If there was a Minor in something finance-related, I would’ve taken that.
N: Yes, you should, even if there's nothing relevant to your career.
You don't have to declare the Minor if you really don't want to. But I think the worst and most self-sabotaging thing you can do, as Zheng Yang mentioned, is to just take fluff 1k mods—mods that don't teach you anything, that don't expect anything of you, that everyone on Reddit recommends you take because you don't have to attend lectures.
You're in university, you're paying to be here. Don't waste all your non-Law MCs on fluff. (Also, taking a mod that you have no personal interest in can get really soul-draining, no matter how light the workload is. It just feels bad.)
And don't say that you "don't have any interests outside of law"... Just try something new! NUSMods is free and easy to use, so just toggle the filters until you find a mod you're curious about.
6. Any other tips, tricks, advice?
Z: The importance of understanding the wider context behind legal practice has been mentioned to us since before we entered law school. I think taking a Minor (if relevant to you and weighing it against your Class of Honours goals) is a great way to do that. And the workload is much lighter anyway, lol.
N: Take the opportunities given to you. Go and register for that Minor now. I know you want to.
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