So that students encounter the humanities, the arts, taste, creativity and sustainable living as part of daily campus life, NCU's Housing Service Section holds science talks and humanities lectures in the residence hall common rooms. Planned and run jointly by residence hall mentors and student hall officers, as many as 25 are held each year. They break out of the conventional classroom, joining living and learning into one and cultivating students' humanistic literacy. As one student put it: "Every hall lecture I attend gives me something. They sparked my enthusiasm for learning across disciplines."
NCU's career mentor system helps each department plan career guidance around its own strengths, linking teaching goals, career development and the talent industry needs. Mentors' core work covers career counselling, planning career guidance activities and supporting internships, with around 150 consultations a year on average. Working with the Career Development Center, mentors arrange talks, company visits, assessments, résumé reviews and mock interviews — close to a hundred events a year, drawing more than 2,000 attendances. Through conversation between teachers and students and contact with industry, young people set learning goals and find fresh motivation to learn.
Service learning joins service and learning together: students learn through the act of serving. NCU's Service Learning Development Center works with service learning mentors to design courses around a four-part structure — preparation, service, reflection and celebration — and raises the quality of those courses through workshops, inter-class collaboration and community service lectures. Students respond warmly. As one wrote: "Our mentor invited many professionals to speak. Seeing them solve social problems with their own expertise keeps alive the wish to make my work count for something."
NCU has 27 departmental student associations. Their mentors offer advice that makes activities richer and more varied, and act as a bridge to the department. Through running these activities students build the softer skills — communication, leadership, care for others — that make for well-rounded citizens. The Extracurricular Activities Section records that association mentors guide around 500 on- and off-campus activities each year, with average student participation of 30,000.
Physical education concerns both bodily and mental wellbeing. Physical education mentors cultivate regular exercise and a spirit of teamwork, weaving sport into everyday life so that students can plan for a lifetime of activity. NCU has performed strongly in competition in recent years.