NOVA Apply

Form follows
the student.

NOVA is a pre-university academy run like a workshop: sixty students, three tracks, everything learned by making — the way the Bauhaus taught it in 1919, with the mathematics of 2026.

Request an interview The three tracks

Est. 2011 · 60 students per cohort · 94% first-choice university placement

The workshop method

Make first

Every concept lands as an object — a proof, a model, a printed plate. Lectures explain what your hands already found.

Critique weekly

Work goes on the wall every Friday. Defending it aloud, to peers, is half the education.

Master & apprentice

Ten students per master. Not a metaphor — your master signs your work before it leaves the building.

Three tracks,
one foundation year.

Everyone does the Vorkurs — drawing, geometry, materials, rhetoric. Then you choose a wall to push against.

H·01

Classical Philosophy

Dialectics, epistemology and civic frameworks — read in the original arguments, defended at the Friday wall.

H·02

Comparative Literature

Architecture of narrative from ancient epic to modern prose. You will write, and be edited, mercilessly.

H·03

Rhetoric & Debate

Weekly parliamentary format. The trophy cabinet is full; the standard is national final.

S·01

Discrete Mathematics

Cryptography, graph theory and computational logic — taught with proofs on paper before code on screens.

S·02

Molecular Modelling

Wet lab plus simulation: cell kinetics and biochemical pathways, one experiment per fortnight, written up like a journal paper.

S·03

Applied Physics Studio

Bridges that must hold, circuits that must run. Marks are given by whether the thing works.

D·01

Spatial Architecture

Drafting, structural physics and urban form. Final project: a habitable structure, built at 1:1 in the courtyard.

D·02

Typography & Media

Letterpress first, screens second. Interface heuristics taught with movable type under your fingernails.

D·03

Material Workshop

Wood, metal, clay, thread. Every design student leaves able to make the object they drew.

Admissions runs
like clockwork.

Three phases, five weeks end to end. Dates published, decisions written, no waitlist purgatory.

  1. 1

    Inquiry packet weeks 1–2

    Transcripts, a writing sample and — this matters — one thing you made. Any medium. We read everything.

  2. 2

    Workshop interview week 3

    Ninety minutes in the actual workshop: a spatial-thinking exercise, then an oral defence of the thing you sent us.

  3. 3

    Board placement week 5

    The full masters’ board reads every file and composes the cohort. Decisions go out in writing, with reasons.

Request an enrolment interview

Cohort of 2027 · applications close 31 October 2026