Minors Become a Reality

-- James Leslie ��04

For the first time in its long and distinguished history, SEAS is offering multiple liberal arts minors to its students. For years, engineers at Columbia could only supplement the famed Core Curriculum with official minors in Economics and Education. After extensive research and polling of engineers, the Academic Affairs Committee of the Engineering Student Council chose the following areas of study in the liberal arts: Architecture, History, Music, English and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Political Science. Many students who apply to the Fu Foundation do so because of the liberal arts education that comes hand in hand at Columbia University with the normal technical studies of a first class engineering institution. Now, these students can take that education even farther than before. It is believed that these minors will encourage Columbia's engineers to become more diversified and to be able to better handle the challenges of the engineering workplace.

Much like previously available minors, they are issued through SEAS and not Columbia College, so the advisor for each minor is a professor in the department of the student's major. All of the new minors have credit requirements of 15 (except Music which has an added two point class for a total of 17 credits), and as with the Economics minor, most of those courses can count toward fulfilling the required non-technical electives.

When the poll was sent out to 136 students, one of several questions was "If you could obtain a minor in any liberal arts subject, which would you pursue?" Of the new minors, most students gave the nod to Music, while the second most popular was Philosophy.