Undergraduate courses

Psychology & Business Management Minor

(available from August 2025)

What is Psychology & Business Management?

Understanding the relationship between human behaviour, business strategies, and technological design is crucial for engineers and designers. The Minor in Psychology and Business Management (PBM) at SUTD is tailored to meet this need by offering key principles of psychology and business management in the context of the university’s design-focused curriculum.

This minor equips students with the knowledge to make connections between the complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces that influence AI and technology development. With a dual discipline approach, the minor hopes to broaden a student’s ability to make significant contributions to the fields of engineering and technology design and create impactful and responsible innovations.

The PBM Mission

To educate responsible, mature adults who can:

• Combine the learning from psychology and business management and respond critically, creatively, and constructively to the global workplace environments where they will be employed.
• Reflect on, analyse, and anticipate the ways in which human behaviour and management decisions will benefit, displace, or otherwise impact the lives of individuals, societies, and the environment.
• Understand how scientific insights and methodological toolkits from psychology, management, and other behavioural sciences can inform novel approaches to human-centred engineering and design, including AI applications.

Course Requirements

This Minor is open only to eligible SUTD students matriculated from AY2024 onwards.

To graduate with the PBM minor, students must successfully complete the following courses:

• 02.001 Global Humanities: Literature, Philosophy, and Ethics
• 02.003 Social Science: Understanding Behaviour, Culture & Society
• Two core courses in Term 4 and Term 5 (one each term, subjected to timetable availability):
  • ONE from either 02.218TS Introduction to Psychology OR 02.145TS Surveys and Experiments in the Social Sciences
  • ONE from either 02.211 Critical management skills OR 02.202 Organizational Process
• Three HASS courses from the list of PBM electives below. This list will continue to grow as new courses are added.
  • ONE must be related to Psychology
  • ONE must be Business Management, Economics, Finance or Entrepreneurship
  • ONE must be taken from the remaining courses in the PBM elective list

Step-by-Step Guidelines

1. Declare PBM Minor before the beginning of Term 4. This can be done in the student portal.
2. Term 4 – Enrol in the PBM core course.
3. Term 5 through 8 – Enrol in one of the approved PBM electives from the table below.

For more information on our application process, please refer to this document.

For students who intend to participate in Global Exchange Programme (GEXP), the overseas HASS courses must be approved for PBM mapping. All student’s requests for new course mapping must be submitted with a brief justification on why the class meets the criteria for the minor. Do note that students are not allowed to map for the 4 core courses.

PBM Electives