This is good news for students around the world. MIT has opened up their coursework material and let anyone view or download from anywhere around the world.
MIT Opencourseware (OCW) is a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. The access to a wide variety of couse material categorized by courses can be browsed here.
Once you have decided to come to Singapore and study here at one of the local universities, you'll need to know what are the entry requirements and assessment methods from the universities.
Undergraduate degree admission for the Singapore local universities requires a student to possess a GCE 'A' level pass certificate or equivalent certificate. SAT score is not compulsory anymore since a few years back.
Those who has graduated from local polytechnics can apply the undergraduate courses using their polytechnic diploma instead of GCE ‘A’ level cert.
Application is open around Feb/March for the intake of the courses that usually start in August of the same year.
Here are some links for admission information:
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/publicportal/about+ntu/acad+admissions/default.htm
http://www.nus.edu.sg/oam/
This top 100 universities list from MSNBC ranks Singapore's NUS (National University of Singapore) at position 36 and NTU (Nanyang Technological University) at the position 71.
Singapore is a small country really. When travelling on MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) train, a person can travel from its west end MRT station (Boon Lay) to the eastmost MRT station (Pasir Ris) in about 1 hour. (SMRT Travel Times). For staying in Singapore, its not really important to stay close by your school, polytechnics or university area. The transportation system is quite efficient here. But students tend to find places to stay near their school area (especially foreign students).
It is common to for foreign students to stay in a group of (usually) 6 persons in a HDB (Housing Development Board) flat.
Foreign students can rent whole flats or by rooms from local flat owners.
JTC (Jurong Town Council) is one other alternative which provide whole flat rentals for foreign talents. Here's the link to the current list of apartments for rent from JTC.
Rental cost from both owner flats and JTC flats are about the same.
3 Room Flats (2 bedrooms, 1 kitchen, 1 living room) cost about S$ 600 to 900 depending on location.
4 Room Flats (3 bedrooms, 1 kitchen, 1 living room) cost about S$ 1000+
If there are many ammenities near the flat, the rental rate is usually higher than average.
Oh, here's Singapore Street Directory site that I usually visit to find directions, flat locations or just finding something.
Infact, you can find some pretty high resoultion aerial images of Singapore at Google Maps.
I have also played around with Google API and created this page.
