Pre-Professional Education
- Jump to information about:
- Business
- Public Health
Many of our students come to us intending to enter the professions, and follow a standard preparatory curriculum grounded in the liberal arts. We do not currently offer any programs—for example, business—that have an explicit pre-professional flavor, with courses that focus more directly on professional training. Such programs appeal greatly to prospective undergraduates. We intend to offer majors that extend our pre-professional reach into business and public health. In both domains we will offer something distinctive that is well grounded in the rigorous traditions of our liberal arts curriculum.
Business
Business is the major in which the largest fraction of high school students indicate interest, and business-related programs provide our greatest opportunity for enlarging the pool of applicants and underpinning expansion of the undergraduate body.
The programs described below follow the recommendations of a joint committee of faculty from the College and the Simon School to attract and provide for very strong students who will be comfortable within the culture of the College. The principal initiatives are a new major in Economics and Business Strategies and a business minor. They are grounded in the liberal arts tradition of the College—a distinguishing feature in common with our new major in Financial Economics.
The new Economics and Business Strategy major provides two paths:
- Organizations and Markets - connects to a management and advanced industrial organization curriculum.
- Methods for Market Analysis - connects to a marketing and advanced econometric curriculum.
The new business minor will provide an explicit business qualification that is a professionally oriented addition to a liberal arts major. It will replace the current Management Certificate.
Public Health
Health-related programs provide an attractive opportunity—offering paths to rigorous degrees outside the traditional pre-medical sequence and providing health-related alternatives for students who decide to leave the pre-medical curriculum.
The physical proximity of the School of Medicine and Dentistry (SMD), the long history of collaboration on the undergraduate curriculum, and the distinction of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine are exceptional resources that we can deploy to offer a portfolio of strong majors that few other universities could match.
Following the recommendations of a working group comprised of faculty from the College and SMD, proposals are being developed for five new majors under the general rubric of public health:
- Science - two new majors, in Environmental Health and in Epidemiology and Statistics
- Social Science - two new majors, in Health and Society and in Health Policy. The Health and Society major would replace the one currently offered.
- Humanities - a new major in Bioethics.