Breadth and depth are the hallmarks of the Rochester Curriculum, which combines freedom with intentionality.
Undergraduate students at the University delve deep into their primary area of study. But sometimes the best ideas, inspirations, and advancements “come not from within a discipline, but from branching out,” as one professor says.
At Rochester, our undergraduates branch out academically through the University’s cluster system. A cluster is a set of related courses that fall within one of the three broad areas of learning: humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences and engineering. Students major in one area, and then pick a cluster in each of the two remaining areas.
The beauty of clusters? Flexibility and versatility. Clusters can closely align with a major, expanding a student’s perspective on and understanding of a subject. Alternatively, they can be completely distinct from one’s major, letting students explore new or intriguing topics. Either way, our undergraduate students experience breadth and depth across academic disciplines in a way more traditional college curricula simply can’t accommodate.
Read More ‘How come nobody else is doing this?’ A history of the Rochester CurriculumArtistic and mathematical space. Cultural consumerism. Islam and the modern world. Sustainable urban development.
These are just some of the interdepartmental majors University of Rochester students created through the Multidisciplinary Studies Center.
Pursuing mechanical engineering and violin performance degrees simultaneously is demanding but rewarding for Ivan Suminski '18, '18E. Suminski practices the violin two to three hours a day-while also playing six hours a week in orchestra, and preparing his senior design project.
Read MoreVirtual reality (VR) uses advanced display and immersive audio technologies to create an interactive, three-dimensional image or environment. Augmented reality (AR), meanwhile, uses digital technology to overlay video and audio onto the physical world to provide information and embellish our experiences.
At the University of Rochester, we’re crossing disciplines to collaborate on VR/AR innovations that will revolutionize how we learn, discover, heal, and create as we work to make the world ever better.
Meet Michele Rucci, a new professor in the University's brain and cognitive sciences department, and his robot “Mr. T.” Rucci and his robot are using eye-tracking tools and virtual reality to replicate the small eye movements experienced by humans. Using a combination of head- and eye-tracking tools, virtual reality, and robots, Rucci’s current research brings together aspects of neuroscience, engineering, and computer science to study how we see.
Read MoreTrained as a scholar of medieval literature, English professor Gregory Heyworth has become—in a term he coined—a “textual scientist.” He recovers the words and images of cultural heritage objects that have been lost, through damage and erasure, to time. To rescue them, Heyworth and his collaborators analyze the images, digitally salvaging ancient manuscripts, maps, and other texts too delicate and precious to transport. They make the undecipherable, and even the invisible, legible again.
Read MoreA program in music leadership offered by the Eastman School of Music pulls in expertise from the Simon Business School. A program offered by the Department of Biomedical Engineering draws heavily on clinical knowledge at the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Jane Marie Souza, associate provost for academic administration, explains how these programs are created and approved, and how she is working to allow students to access a more complete digital profile of their work across all schools.
Read More“Medieval times” often conjures images of knights on Crusades, castles surrounded by moats, or perhaps the dragons from Game of Thrones. But such images only scratch the surface of what medieval studies entails. The Early Worlds Initiative—an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Rochester—connects faculty studying social and cultural developments worldwide from medieval times to the early modern period.
Read MoreRichard Thaler ’74 (PhD), was a multi-disciplinarian well before it was hip. Recognized by the Nobel committee in 2017 for his contributions to behavioral economics—a field that he helped create—Thaler’s research bridges the gap between economics and psychology, trying to understand how real people behave.
Read MoreSince 1986, nearly 1,200 University students have pursued their academic passions through the Take Five Scholars Program, which offers a tuition-free year to complete a self-designed curriculum.
Read MoreMusic is not only a major part of Dan Fabbio’s life, as a music teacher it is his livelihood. So when doctors discovered a tumor located in the part of his brain responsible for music function, he began a long journey that involved a team of University of Rochester physicians, scientists, and a music professor and culminated with him awake and playing a saxophone as surgeons operated on his brain.
Read MoreFrom the post-Reformation trauma of Shakespeare’s history plays, to the poignant scrapbooks created by the families of British soldiers killed in World War I, the fellowships sponsored by the Humanities Center this year focus on the interdisciplinary study of memory and forgetting.
Read MoreAfter years of working with patients and researching fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), Christie Petrenko, a research associate at the University’s Mt. Hope Family Center, knew a mobile app might be just the tool she was missing in order to help families and caregivers of children with FASD.
Read MoreThe statistics are grim. Every minute across the United States 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner. That’s more than 10 million women and men every year. One in 15 children will be an eyewitness to such abuse. Reason enough for researchers to try to find ways to curb this public health problem.
Read MoreChicago, Istanbul, Rome, and Delhi. The students in the 100-level course The City: Contested Spaces take a virtual tour of them all, while pondering an overarching question—can people’s lives be reshaped by redesigning urban spaces?
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