Core Pathways
Focus on one of the major challenges facing the world today by exploring that challenge from multiple disciplines.
Follow a Pathway by taking Core courses on your chosen Pathway. Your Pathway will help you advertise your unique skills, expertise, collaborations, and interests to prospective employers, and help you articulate your own passions and commitments to a more just and human world through your Core journey.
How does a Core Pathway work?
Throughout your Core journey, you'll take 13 courses that invite you to develop your skills and knowledge across a breadth of disciplines. Each course is like a bucket containing many different class options. You can select your class of choice to fulfill each of the 13 required courses. Many Core classes are identified as fulfilling a Pathway.
Students who take 4 Core classes on a given Pathway will achieve that Core Pathway.
Process for Declaring and Tracking a Pathway
Students can declare a Pathway any time before they file for graduation. Students can search through Core course offerings by Pathway when they plan for registration and view their progress toward a Pathway on their program evaluation.
Choose Your Pathway
The Racial and Economic Justice Pathway is designed to attune you to the historic and contemporary forces that create and sustain injustice, and to prepare you to join the struggle for equity and equality. Through this Pathway, you will build the capacity to see and understand the way power is shaped, often to support racial and economic oppression, and critically examine these expressions of power historically, economically, politically, socially, religiously, and more. Ultimately, this Pathway prepares you for activated works of solidarity and justice for the sake of a society that is genuinely just and humane for all people.
Learning Outcome
Upon completion of this Pathway, you will be able to contribute to honorable community building practices and policies of equality and equity toward a more just and humane society with the ability to engage issues of racial and economic injustice.
Through the Technology and Its Impact on Society Pathway, students will be equipped with the knowledge to apply the processes of scientific and technological inquiry and analyze information using relevant scientific and technological principles to solve real-world problems. With these foundational scientific and technological knowledge and skills, students will enhance their abilities to construct evidence-based assessments.
Learning Outcome
Upon successfully completing this Pathway, students will be able to fairly evaluate the mutual impacts between society and science and/or technology with their assessments and effectively communicate their evaluations to diverse audiences with the goal of building humane technologies for a just world.
The Climate and Sustainability Pathway will prepare you to address human impacts on the environment. By emphasizing the environmental, social, and economic components of sustainability, courses in this pathway will deepen your understanding of the roots of these problems and highlight ways in which environmental burdens are distributed inequitably. You will develop foundational knowledge about environmental issues, leading to the ability to investigate these issues using tools from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. By completing this Pathway, you will be prepared to critique existing solutions and propose equitable ones to address these pressing issues.
Learning Outcome
Upon completion of this Pathway, you will be able to contribute to multidisciplinary solutions to environmental issues in ways that equitably integrate social, economic, and environmental factors.
The Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Pathway is designed to attune you to the ways gender and sexuality shape lived experiences in the United States and around the world. Theories and case studies you encounter in your coursework will demonstrate how masculinity, femininity, sexual orientation, and gender identity are not fixed social concepts, but rather are shaped by social and historical contexts, and that they can change over time in relation to power. By completing this Pathway, you will be prepared to continue to critically examine the social construction of gender and sexuality in future coursework in the University Core and in your major and you will be more equipped to advocate for justice for communities currently marginalized for their modes of gender and/or sexual expression.
Learning Outcome
Upon completion of this Pathway, you will be able to analyze power in contemporary and historical social constructions of gender and sexuality in order to contribute to expanding access to justice for all, but especially populations marginalized for their gender identities and/or sexual orientations.
The Community Engaged Pathway will develop your academic skills, introduce you to career opportunities and prepare you for future involvement in your community. In community engaged learning designated courses, you will learn about issues facing local, national or international communities and consider how individuals or groups can contribute to equitable solutions. These courses will include a placement at an organization, a group project that supports the work of a community partner or advocacy for a social justice issue. You will learn inside and outside the classroom to increase your knowledge of the course content while developing skills, like teamwork, cultural humility and critical thinking. Through completing this Pathway, you will develop the capacity to contribute to equitable solutions for issues impacting communities with cultural humility.
Learning Outcome
Upon completion of this Pathway, you will be able to contribute to equitable solutions for issues impacting communities furthest from social justice with cultural humility.