<p>I am currently a junior in high school, and I was looking at the Florida State website. I really want to attend this university in two years, but when I ran across the general education requirement it confused me. It showed requirements for liberal arts. Are liberal arts a requirement for your first two years in college regardless of the choice of major?</p>
<p>The liberal arts are considered to be Literature, History, Mathematics, Languages, Philosophy and Science. This is distinguished from professional or technical or vocational studies. </p>
<p>So general education requirements for any major usually will consist of credits in the liberal arts. It is considered the mark of an educated person to be well rounded an exposed to the liberal arts. This is pretty much the case at every school and true of most any major. Although Engineering isn’t considered to be a liberal art, most Colleges of Engineering will require some credits in liberal arts as part of general education requirements, but maybe to a lesser extent.</p>
<p>The vast majority of colleges have some sort of general education requirements; the number of courses and which courses can be used to fulfill requirements vary by college.</p>
<p>You generally need 36 credits of general ed classes at FSU, but some of these may overlap with your major, so it may actually be less. One college class is usually 3-4 credits, so you may take 9-12 gen ed classes. You can also take AP exams to get out of taking some of your gen eds.</p>
<p>Can you concentrate your studies after studying liberal arts?</p>
<p>Yes you can. I think one purpose of liberal art is to give you a well-rounded education and great preparation for professional studies. A lot of great undergraduate schools are liberal art including Harvard, I believe.</p>
<p>In college, 1/3 classes are meant to educate you broadly (the general education or distribution requirements): they make sure you understand others and their perspectives, the world around you, the past and what it means to today, science and what it means to our world, etc. You should also show excellent writing skills. It’s because, if you’re college-educated, you’re more than a technician. In addition, when it’s well-done, gen ed classes make you discover subjects you had never taken and many students actually discover a new interest through that, often minoring or even majoring in that new subject.
Then 1/3 classes are in the specialty you chose: your major. Your first year you will take one or two classes to see if it’s what you thought it’d be, if you can do well in it, etc. Progressively you increase the number of classes in your major so that your junior and senior year you probably have 6 classes our of 10 in your major (3 each semester).
Then 1/3 classes are totally free: you can choose whatever strikes your interest (history of rock’n roll, robotics…), complete a minor, a concentration, or if need be take remedial classes, etc.
Liberal Arts are the traditional intellectual disciplines representing music, art, literature, philosophy, the art of discourse, science. They’ve been expanded quite a bit over the last 1,000 years of course but the fundamentals are still the same: you will pass for a doofus and will have trouble rising through the ranks if you never read a book, have never seen a film, heard music from before your birth, or been to a museum (or at least seen the pictures of some art), if you have no clue that pollution and chemistry are related, that physics and war engines or cars are related, if you can’t see the links between sports and statistics, if you if you only know one thing which is the exact thing you need for your job and nothing else. However, young people often don’t see the value of that until about 5-10 years after college, that’s why it’s integrated into the college curriculum.
You’ll have lots and lots of choices though - even at a small college you’ll have hundreds of courses from which to choose.</p>