Being a humanities major at CalTech/MIT vs an LAC like Williams/Amherst/Pomona

College Search & Selection
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Something to consider is the school’s distribution requirements. MIT and Caltech will make you take quite a few courses in the sciences. At Caltech most of your courses are in STEM freshman year https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/explore/academics/core-curriculum, which is really inconvenient for a humanities major. Someone else linked MIT’s, I think.

At liberal arts colleges, it’s much more balanced. Williams and Pomona both have a significant amount of distribution requirements, but they’re spread throughout the different fields, possibly even skewed towards humanities and social sciences. Amherst has an open curriculum, so there are no distribution requirements (pretty sweet IMO).

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To go to Caltech or MIT as a humanities major, one has to love the sciences. This is certainly a substantial STEM core at either one of these two schools. They could be a fit, however, for an English major who wants to be a science or science-fiction writer, or a history major who wants to focus on the history of sciences (as in the wonderful story told in one of the previous posts), or a philosophy major who wants to examine the relationship between sciences and philosophy or the philosophical foundations of sciences.

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