NY Master's in Education... General Core Requirements? Freaking out.

Graduate School
1

I’m a current Senior at a small liberal arts school and I want to earn my Master’s in Secondary English Education in NY. The problem is that every program I look at includes a looong list of prerequisite “General Educational Core” courses in which I’m supposed to have credits before I apply. Here’s an example from Hofstra:

Artistic Expression/Humanities (3 s.h.)
Communication (3 s.h.)
Information Retrieval or placement exam (0-3 s.h.)
Concepts in History/Social Science (3 s.h.)
Language other than English (3 s.h.)
Scientific Processes (3 s.h.)
Mathematical Processes (3 s.h.)
Literature, Analysis and Written Expression (6 s.h.)

The problem is that my college doesn’t have core requirements and so I don’t have any credits in over half of these areas! All the other NY schools I’ve looked at, including CUNY and SUNY, have similar lists. I have a 4.0 and can get excellent recommendations, but will I have any chance if I don’t meet these prerequisites? I was already planning to take a gap year and, if need be, take community college courses to make up the credits I need, but looking at this list I’m not even sure if I can take all of these courses in a year! Any guidance would be much-appreciated.

2

You might need to take courses at your local CC to make up the requirements. I"m not too sure, but to be certified in NYS you MUST have taken those courses.

You mean to say that at your college you didn’t take any science, math, english or history? Not even a music/art class?

I’m willing to bet you did take some of these classes, you just don’t know that they probably fall under one of those categories.