SMU announced the formation of a new College of Integrative Studies (CIS), which will take in up to 100 freshmen from August next year. In a first for a local university, undergraduates will be able to take their pick from several hundreds of courses and customise their major. They can select all modules across SMU's six schools and they will graduate with a bachelor's degree in Integrative Studies after four years. Each student will be guided by a faculty adviser drawn from CIS or the larger SMU faculty to choose his or her curriculum. SMU President Professor Lily Kong said, "The integration of disciplines and domains is how new knowledge is produced. We have set out to develop a new generation of graduates who will be able to combine knowledge domains, who can respond to industry disruption in multi-dimensional and non-linear ways."