Popularity of Student-Designed Majors and Minors Option Soars at Holy Cross

For Richard Matlak, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies at Holy Cross, the first indication of the burgeoning popularity of his program’s self-designed major option arrived in a peculiar way.

“This past semester, I talked to some students in my office, but it occurred to me we never had an open information session,” Matlak says. “So I decided we’d hold a little pizza meeting for anyone interested. I thought we’d maybe get 10, 12 students. By the 5 o’clock start time we already had 25 students, and our pizza was all gone!”

In total, the program garnered 35 applications for the self-designed major this term, and an additional 12 applications for self-designed minors. Previously, Matlak recalled, “we’d been holding steady at somewhere around 10 to 12 applications a term.”

The booming popularity of the program is due to a variety of factors.

“I think, first, that the faculty are becoming really supportive, and starting to get behind the program with enthusiasm,” Matlak says. At the same time, it’s “taken a while for everyone to get the ground rules in their mind.” As faculty and students hear more about the program, and become more accustomed to the processes that go into a successful self-designed major, more and more of the College is getting involved.

While the range of topics for the student-designed programs is as broad as what can be realistically viable with the classes the College offers, a number of the students tend to cluster around certain popular programs.

Because of the current cultural zeitgeist, Matlak says, “a good number of students are taking the environmental studies route.” Additionally, he says, several of the majors reflect groups of classes that are already popular among students, and thus are prime material for a major through CISS: “Chinese Language and Civilization, architectural studies, deaf studies, and childhood and development studies are all popular and becoming more so.”

Students, however, need not feel that they should restrict themselves to tried-and-true majors in CISS. Any major is conceivable, as long as it passes all requirements for approval.

All of the submissions for the self-designed programs, says Matlak, “must go through a rigorous application process.” The students have to prepare a “rationale statement,” which explains the overall conception behind their proposal. Additionally, they have to give a curricular plan, which details which classes they propose to take during each semester, and how and why these particular courses fit into the overarching program that they are creating.

“There’s a lot of hard work and planning that goes into creating these programs,” Matlak says. After looking through the catalogue for classes amenable to their interests, the students, with the help of two faculty advisors, submit their proposals to the major/minor committee under CISS, which is comprised of 10 faculty members from various disciplines.

The program plans that the students submit must be both multidisciplinary (including courses from at least three departments), and based in the liberal arts.

“We’re hoping that the students get an ‘organized breadth’ of learning from this experience,” says Matlak. “We want to see coherence, a real progression in these various courses, not just a hodge-podge of different things.”

And as for the question of who can apply to the program, the answer is, surprisingly, almost anyone. “We have a requirement of a 3.0 GPA for the program, but in terms of class year, we have everything, from first-year students to seniors, who’ve been somewhat intentionally following a viable self-designed degree path,” Matlak says.

Ultimately, he says, even within a liberal arts institution, programs like the self-designed major and minor will become increasingly important. “This is the direction that knowledge is moving in — to multidisciplinary perspectives on the big issues of society and education.”

Many of the College’s faculty members already teach in a way that embraces this idea of academic cooperation and coordination. And at any school, Matlak says, “disciplinary depth is wonderful, but it’s also important to know how you can apply a variety of disciplines to a question.”

By Ross Weisman ’09

Related Information:

• Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies