So I was looking at the website (not thoroughly, I’ll admit) and I was wondering how academic programs worked. What’s the difference between a major and a careers in program and even an interdisciplinary opportunity?
Would I be able to double major in Math and Geography with a Careers in in business and an interdisciplinary opportunity in creative writing? Do students often mix all of these together? Thanks!
For you, and for every other student, your first assignment is really reading the college course catalog. It’s a fabulous document – or it used to be a fabulous document, now it’s a bunch of web pages that are intended to work together. You can learn a lot by reading it, but you have to pay close attention and figure out what’s most important and what is secondary.
With the University of Chicago, the place to start is the page called “The Curriculum”: http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/thecurriculum/. That’s the overview of everything you have to know to satisfy the requirements for an undergraduate degree from the University, and all of the options you have for getting there. (Of course, when you arrive in Chicago, you will have an academic advisor with whom you will meet at least a few times a year, and who will make certain you understand what you need to about this. But if you pay close attention to the document, and think about it carefully, you will know about 95% of what your advisor does.) There are a lot of other pages, but you can’t really understand how they fit into the overall program unless you understand “The Curriculum” as a whole.
Here are some hints, though. The two most important things at Chicago are the General Education requirements, otherwise known as the Core, and completing a major. The Core is sort of a Chinese restaurant menu – take one from column A and two from column B, or maybe one from each of A, B, and C. It represents 3-4 quarters of your college career, in total, or 25-33%. Your major is in addition to the Core, and it usually represents 4-5 quarters of work. While everything in the Core is about breadth of knowledge, your major is about doing a deep dive into something – building a base of the fundamentals, then getting much more sophisticated about the particular areas that interest you most, and usually culminating in advanced courses and original research in very focused topics.
Most majors are in established, specific academic disciplines, but there are a few majors that deliberately cross departmental lines. Some of these are established programs that are unique to the University of Chicago – see “Big Problems” and “Fundamentals.” If you really want to, with the assistance of your advisor and faculty you may be able to design your own major. (That’s not always a good idea, although in some cases it can be fabulous. If it’s right for you, you will know it when you are a second-year student. You will NOT know it when you haven’t started college yet.) And there are other areas, like creative writing or computational neuroscience, where lots of other colleges have established majors, but the University of Chicago only has them as options for focus tracks within a traditional major (English or Biology, in those cases) that will be noted on your transcript.
The collection of web pages called “Interdisciplinary Opportunities” is talking about these, but it’s a little incoherent because in some cases it’s talking about a special major and in others it’s explaining why a special major doesn’t exist and what you should do if you wish it did.
Some students complete two majors, or even in some cases three (when that happens, one of the three majors is almost always math). It can be easy or hard to do that, depending on the majors (math plus anything else in the social sciences or physical sciences is pretty easy; two unrelated fields with a lot of requirements would be tough), and also depending on how much time you have to devote to meeting Core and introductory requirements. If you test or place out of the language requirement and/or math courses through basic calculus, you will have a lot more flexibility in your course planning.
But it’s really not necessary, or even a good idea, to do a double major. The big cost of doing a double major is not being able to take elective courses in a variety of fields. Electives are a great way to learn a lot more about things that interest you that are not directly related to your major, and often people will cluster a few electives in a secondary field so that they know a fair amount about that field without majoring in it. It’s not uncommon at all for people to get jobs, or go to graduate school, in an area that interested them when they were undergraduates, but that wasn’t their “major”.
Formalizing that elective-cluster idea, some departments (but not all of them), offer a “minor,” where if you take the right collection of courses (usually 4-5 of them, or a quarter-and-a-half worth) your transcript will show a minor in that department. Minors are a great idea if the field in which you are interested has a minor, and if you really, really need some kind of formal acknowledgment that you took a bunch of courses in some non-major area. Some major-minor combos are so popular that they are essentially built into the appropriate major as a separate option, like Math With Specialization in Economics or Physics With Specialization in Astrophysics. (The former is especially valuable, because the Economics Department, the largest department in the college by far, chooses not to offer the option of a minor in Economics.)
Finally, the University has special advising programs for students interested in certain fields for employment and graduate school: that’s all the “Chicago Careers in [Whatever]” stuff. Those aren’t courses or majors, they are something like career-focused clubs. They all provide access to specialized advisors who will help you adjust your course schedule and your reasearch and internships so you are sure to touch all the bases your chosen industry/grad school expects you to touch. Sometimes they sponsor special lectures or lunch programs, stuff like that. But they’re not part of the University’s academic program at all.
Thank you so much!
JHS does such a great job with his post that he ought to charge!