Good resource for where school falls on open/core curriculum

EllieMom
Sun, 02 Sep 2018 18:55:01 +0000

@ucbalumnus

Letting students use their major courses in breadth areas is fairly common, not unique to Rochester.

I was not saying that was unique to Rochester. Only responding to your observation that requiring 3 courses in each of humanities, social studies, and science would result in volume to breadth requirements at many other schools. It doesn’t work out that way in reality because the combination of “pick your own” clusters, and further reduction of requirements for engineering students and/or those who double major or minor, actually does result in fairly “minimal” requirements that can be tailored to the student’s interests.

For someone like my daughter, in addition to two majors (one in natural sciences and one in social sciences), one would only have to take four courses—a humanities cluster and a freshman writing seminar—and would be able to create a “cluster” made up of classes that would have been taken as electives in any case (and that could be exactly the kind of “quirky and just interesting” courses that @dadof4kids was inquiring about). By the end of freshman year, it is possible to satisfy those requirements along with as much as half of the pre-med requirements. That makes it easy to take a semester abroad, for instance, without worrying about meeting core + two sets of major requirements. And there were no dreaded language or speech or PE requirements, all of which my daughter wanted to avoid if possible. That is very different than the “must take two classes in each of the following six subject areas plus a writing seminar (or two) plus demonstrate language proficiency” that other schools she was considering required.