Intellectual Skills

Overview

Practical, real-world knowledge and a range of intellectual abilities across disciplines are essential components of any liberal arts education.

These courses help students develop important academic capacities for use during their undergraduate career and in the rapidly changing world they'll enter after college.

Requirements

  • Foundation Seminar (course code: FOUN)
  • Lab Science (course code: LBSC)
  • Foreign Language (course code: CCFL)
  • Integrated Perspectives (course code: CCIP)

Foundation Seminar

One writing-intensive W1 course in the fall of the first year

Students will develop writing, reading, speaking, listening and information literacy skills necessary for collegiate-level academic work. Students will develop capacities for independent academic work and become more accountable for their own learning.

Lab Science

One course from the list of designated courses

Students will develop a unified understanding of scientific theory and practice in modern natural science. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the development of science as an intellectual pursuit and of the ways in which scientific ideas are formulated, modified and come to be accepted. Students will demonstrate skill in the application of scientific techniques and methods, including the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, and communication of results.

Foreign Language

One course from the list of designated courses

Students will study language as a complex multifunctional phenomenon — as a system for communicating thought and information and as an essential element of human thought processes, perceptions and self-expression — that allows students to understand different peoples and their communities. Students will examine the world, their own culture and their own language through the lens of a foreign language and culture.

Integrated Perspectives

One team-taught interdisciplinary course taken during the sophomore or junior year from the list of designated courses

Students will recognize, construct and evaluate connections among different intellectual methods, ways of learning and bodies of knowledge.