Schools with flexible (but not nonexistent) core requirements

tk21769
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:56:09 +0000

You ought to be asking yourself, too, whether you don’t want some layer of quality control over your program choices. Even the better Open Curriculum schools, I would think, are likely to have a little dragon at the door that allows you to take nothing but sociology courses for 4 years.

A good cogsci major does need some breathing room, for sure. But, don’t overlook the fact that many courses that satisfy your cogsci major requirements (needs, wants) may well overlap with your core or distribution requirements.

I’m not trying to argue in these posts that some rational concentrations would not be fairly hard to do at some colleges. I think for example that a dual Chinese-Japanese major, with an emphasis on language and literature, might be a little hard to pull off at Chicago. This is ironic, because Chicago has some wonderful opportunities in Asian studies. However, the standard undergraduate Asia program is “East Asian Languages and Civilizations”, which has its own program requirements on top of the extensive Core requirements. It leaves room for maybe 1 year-long sequence in the second language. So, without extra summer school work or the academic equivalent of a Papal Dispensation, I imagine it would be hard to build up very high from that foundation concurrently in both languages.