AY2026/27 Term 2

COMM334 is a strategic communication elective module with an overseas study component designed to equip students to be able to manage and appreciate the dynamic role of communication in Asia. As part of the SMU-X Overseas programme, students will be working on a real-world communication project sponsored by an organisation based in Hong Kong, in addition to being offered opportunities to network with newsroom editors and leading communication practitioners from across Asia. 

This course provides students with a valuable and comprehensive understanding necessary to navigate the region’s fast-changing and complex geopolitical and cultural landscape as businesses face insurmountable communication challenges to build trust and defend reputation. Students in this class may also be considered for internship opportunities in Hong Kong.

The aim of this course is to learn from the thought leadership and practice of various companies and organizations in Vietnam, and for us to recognize the relationship between success and positive corporate culture. The corporate and social impact of good culture in companies and organizations cannot be underestimated.

This course’s focus on Vietnam’s corporate culture is timely as Vietnam is at an interesting point in its corporate development. Vietnam is rapidly growing into a “middle-class” economy, propelled by an expanding young workforce. In 2025-2026, the median age of the labour force is about 33. The country’s numerous corporations and organizations are necessarily adapting to new trends in marketing, change management and corporate culture. 

Many organizations have already successfully adapted well to modern market demands. Do these corporations and organizations rely on one or two individuals, or do the staff function as a team, regardless of rank? Is being competitive and aggressive prized over nurturance and social support? Is the chain of command lauded, or is less hierarchy appreciated? Features of culture such as diversity and inclusion, individualism/collectivism, power distance, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, and issues related to episodes and relationships in intercultural communication will be discussed.

This is an SMU-X Overseas course. Students will have the chance to visit Ho Chi Minh City and participate in project work with local organizations. They will also visit Vietnam companies and network with practitioners, apply their knowledge and skills in real-world settings. This hands-on experience provides practical insights into Vietnamese business practices and culture, helps develop cross-cultural competencies, and facilitates building professional networks in the Vietnamese market.

The course takes place in both SMU and our partner university in Vietnam. It culminates in a group project which will focus on understanding the corporate culture and values of an organisation based in Vietnam, and developing an integrated communication and business strategy for a programme related to social and organisational impact, tailored to its identified stakeholders. 

AI is rapidly changing the way in which narratives are told (by organizations, brands, and leaders) and received (by audiences). In this course, you will learn what drives narrative visibility and citations in AI-generated recommendations. In addition, you will acquire the skills to use agentic AI in narrative creation. You will also develop the judgment – the new bottleneck in the age of AI agents – to evaluate and refine narratives. Finally, you will have the opportunity to apply what you have learnt to a real-time, real-world client project. The outcome of this project will be a tangible deliverable that you can add to your professional portfolio.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been transforming how accountants interact with data, make decisions, and deliver insights since the return of AI Spring in the late 2010s. As these technologies evolve from passive tools into agent interfaces that work alongside professionals, accounting graduates need to be equipped to work effectively with them, and to remain professionally responsible for the output AI produces. 

This course develops a functional understanding of AI with an emphasis on practical application in accounting. Students will engage with a range of accounting use cases and gain hands-on experience building simple AI-enabled solutions to real-world problems. 

The course will introduce core concepts in AI (both analytical and generative AI) and modern agent interfaces, including how outputs can be shaped through effective prompting, how agent-enabled workflows are designed, and the considerations involved in using AI responsibly and ethically in professional settings. A recurring theme in the course is the concept of the accountant as an AI auditor. Accountants remain professionally responsible for AI output and must be able to review, verify, and judge it before relying on it in accounting work. 

By the end of the course, students will be better prepared to adapt to the changing nature of accounting work, equipped with the mindset and foundational capabilities to work alongside AI and respond to evolving technologies. Each student will also leave the course with a portfolio of AI-enabled builds completed during the term.

This course explores how data can be used to solve problems across financial accounting, managerial accounting, and audit contexts. Students will gain exposure to techniques to explore how financial and non-financial data is used to forecast events, detect financial discrepancies and frauds, predict corporate default, optimize operations, and determine business strategy. Some programming and data visualisation skills will be required to draw insights from large volumes of data. Advanced analytics methods such as text analytics, neural networks and deep learning will also be introduced. This course has been designed to equip students with an analytics mind-set to develop analytics strategies and make better business decisions.

Accountants regularly work with large amounts of financial and non-financial data. Data modelling is an important means through which accountants can analyse such data for trends, patterns, relationships, and other useful information for decision making. This course will introduce a variety of quantitative techniques used in the development, implementation, and utilization of analytical data models that accountants regularly use in decision making. It will cover techniques including regression analysis, trend analysis, optimization, text analytics, and simulation. 

Visualization provides an important means through which accountants can communicate insights obtained via data modelling to their intended recipients. Well-designed visualisations can improve the memory, comprehension, and decision making of intended recipients of this information. This course will introduce students to key principles and techniques for data visualization. Students will create visuals including dashboards and interactive visualisations for decision making in the accounting context. 

Traditionally, the accounting function’s role is always viewed as that of a steward, the control centre for the organisation, rather than the catalyst for enterprise growth. The term ‘back office’ is often used to describe the operating nature of accounting function. So in today’s volatile global business environment, the key challenge for accounting function is how to lead the enterprise in its growth strategies while ensuring effective risk management and stewardship of the enterprise. With complexity and data proliferation, increasingly the CEO and the board turn to accountants to help make sense of all the data, to help cut through this complexity, and to provide more informed analysis on the business and its operation. 

The opportunity for accounting function is if it can generate the insights that help make better corporate decision making, while continuing to ensure effective control of the enterprise, its reputation as a catalyst for growth will be guaranteed. To do so, traditional accounting departments may have to transform themselves into ‘intelligent accounting functions’. Intelligent accounting functions run their operations as cost effectively as possible, leveraging technology to reduce finance operating costs; strengthen stewardship and control so as to establish a solid foundation to support growth. The biggest challenges, however, lie in creating the efficiencies needed to gather and process basic financial data and continue to deliver traditional finance outputs while at the same time redeploying their limited resources to enable higher-value business decision support activities.

This accounting analytics practicum which adopts SMU-X approach, focuses on a few key topics that are vital to establishing an intelligent accounting function (refer to the diagram below): finance strategy and transformation, lean finance and finance shared services, business intelligence analytics, and enterprise process management. In this experiential learning course, students from various disciplines learn what comprises a highly optimised accounting process, design an end-to-end process management and explore the underlying accounting IT systems and advanced data analytical applications. 

By working closely with instructors from accounting and information systems disciplines, together with an industry partner, students are expected to carry out design and development of an intelligent accounting function solution. The whole idea is to engage students in real-life application and to encourage students to creatively apply concepts to practical problems in their pursuit of solving real-world problems. Students will apply the concepts in real projects. 

This SMU-X course will give SMU law students opportunities to work one-on-one with graduate mentors to produce high-quality case commentaries or shorter-form legal articles, with an aspirational goal of publication. As well as enhancing their legal knowledge, students will hone their writing and editing skills, and learn to communicate their analysis in a manner which is helpful to both lawyers and non-lawyers. This will also help students develop their body of work as they move from school into practice. Students should propose their own ideas (ideally involving issues of practical significance, analysis of which would be helpful to practitioners and/or the general public), so that they can be matched with a mentor with the appropriate expertise. 

Students will work closely together with their graduate mentor on their commentaries or articles, crafting their work and receiving feedback and comments on a pre-agreed schedule. Students can also build up their networking skills through these mentorships. At the end of the course, students will have produced one case commentary or article of around 6,000 words. The students can submit their papers to SMU Lexicon or other forums. (Publication is not a requirement for the course grade, but the course will help you towards that goal.)

This course aims to provide students with an introduction to the legal practice of banking and finance. In particular, this course is designed to give students a flavour of what life is like as a transactional lawyer working on a general banking transaction. Over the weeks, students will be walked through the lifecycle of a fictitious watered-down financing transaction. As the transaction progresses, students will gradually be introduced to the various financing legal documents (eg, term sheets, loan facility agreements, corporate authorisations) and their key clauses. Crucially, students will also step into the shoes of lender’s counsel and be given several opportunities to “hold the pen” – students will be tasked to take instructions from their clients and draft/review certain financing legal documents. 

Finally, students will participate and lead an all-parties call to iron out the outstanding issues blocking the transaction from closing. Through this course, students will have the opportunity to both gain insights on transactional lawyering, as well as learn practical skills that will better prepare students to transition to their upcoming lives as practice trainees and junior associates. Moreover, while this course is conducted in the context of banking and finance, the practical skills taught in this course will nonetheless be largely applicable to other fields of transactional law, including but not limited to mergers and acquisitions, investment funds, capital markets etc.

The energy industry is a significant player in the international dispute resolution sphere, spanning across investor-state, public international law, commercial and construction related disputes. The course seeks to equip students with a broad understanding of issues relating to energy contracts and disputes, from both a substantive and practical perspective, viewed through the lifecycle of typical energy projects. This course will therefore be highly relevant to both aspiring transactional and dispute resolution lawyers, and qualifies as a capstone course for the Dispute Resolution track at the School of Law. Participants will be introduced to the key features of energy projects and investments, the parties involved, and some of the unique characteristics of disputes arising in the energy sector. 

On disputes, the course also involves a study of both commercial and investor-state arbitration, investment protection treaties and instruments in the energy sector, and related case law in international arbitration arising therefrom. Participants will then gain an understanding of the various strategic considerations on handling cross-border energy disputes, including how to prevent them from the outset, and managing a dispute across each stage of the dispute resolution process. The course will involve leading practitioners who will share practical perspectives on the intersection between commercial and legal considerations. Participants will apply their knowledge through class presentations and group discussions.