By Dave Best
Galin Education College Admissions Counselor
At Galin Education, we work with great students to help them target and land at their best fit colleges. Some even come to us with their major and career planned out. Other students are not confined within a single discipline and come to us with questions like: “What if I can’t find a major that matches my dreams?” or “What if I cannot complete a double major in four years?” Fortunately there are some colleges that enable students to design their own major.
How cool would it be to structure your studies to fit the things you really want to understand? Not only an interdisciplinary major but one custom designed by you and for you. Here are a few real life “hybrid majors”: Sociology of Fashion, Neuroscience of Art, Globalization and Economic Development.
As you can imagine, coming to a school that enables custom majors relies on outstanding advising. These individualized and interdisciplinary programs have a lot of freedom, so students need support creating a concentration that makes sense while being substantive and rigorous.
Students who design their own majors will need to communicate their self-direction and ability to solve complex problems. These unique skillsets when properly positioned can help graduates blaze their own path and follow their dreams.
Listed below are links and school-supplied descriptions of their design your own major programs:
Northeast
NYU Gallatin School for Individualized Study
A small, liberal arts college housed within a major research university, Gallatin attracts creative, self-motivated students who seek to design their own course of study. Students work closely with faculty advisers to create distinctive academic concentrations that allow them to bring together interests from across a wide range of disciplines. Building a strong foundation in significant world texts and the history of ideas through Gallatin’s seminar courses, students also benefit from all the resources of NYU by enrolling in courses in the various NYU schools. Outside of the classroom, students can advance their academic goals by developing individualized projects through independent study, tutorials, and internships and private lessons in the arts. In their final year, seniors complete the Senior Colloquium, the capstone project that showcases their academic achievements and intellectual explorations.
Southeast
The mission of the independent scholars major is to provide students with a learning environment in which they develop and pursue self-designed curricular pathways and research goals, identifying unique domains of inquiry and interweaving multiple modes of thinking. Students are empowered to cultivate their own academic and professional interests in ways that foster the ability to comprehend and contribute uniquely and innovatively to a wide array of topics, questions and problems. Competitive admissions open to all students with a 3.25 GPA or higher.
Midwest
The bachelor of individualized study (BIS) and the individually designed interdepartmental major (IDIM) are for College of Liberal Arts students who want to tailor their educational programs to their own interests and goals.
The bachelor of individualized studies (BIS) is a degree program in which you combine three areas of concentration rather than have a major. One concentration may be from another University of Minnesota college (non-College of Liberal Arts), and the concentrations may be unrelated to each other.
An individually designed interdepartmental major (IDIM) (for a bachelor of arts degree) enables you to focus on a unifying theme by combining courses from three or more CLA departments.
West
An Individualized Studies major is a special interdisciplinary major designed by an individual student. Each Individualized Studies program is unique.
A university education is about learning to ask and answer complex questions. The Individualized Studies program allows highly motivated and self-directed students to pursue the questions about which they are most passionate when those questions cannot be pursued in current UW programs. Individualized Studies students epitomize the intentional intellectual engagement at the core of a great liberal education: focused, rigorous, disciplinary learning, even when integrating multiple disciplines.
The Individualized Studies program is not a means to vocational or applied versions of existing degrees; nor does it provide a secondary alternative to (or a light version of) existing majors. It is, instead, a place for intellectually curious, reflective, and highly self-directed students who embrace learning for its own sake. This program is not a place to get a degree; this is a place to pursue deep learning.
