Message from the Dean
Welcome to the College of Arts and Sciences. There is so much to share about the College in terms of its breadth and depth that I can not even begin to tell you. But our Web site is a good place for you to look at us. So please drill down into the departments and programs, and look at the cutting-edge research of the faculty from the arts and humanities, through the social sciences, and into the natural sciences. Find out about the wide variety of our undergraduate majors taught by our 22 departments, as well as our large number of interdisciplinary majors, dual majors, minors, and everything else we offer in a large urban university that is committed to academic excellence. Look at our growing list of graduate programs from the PhD to the MS/MA degrees, some of which are combined with the BS/BA degree. See the good work being done by our research centers. Just as you would suspect for a College of Arts and Sciences at a major research university, we have a lot to offer.
But there is something one might not expect from a College of Arts and Sciences, and that is our strong commitment to experiential learning. It has been our tradition for 100 years, and we are the masters of it. For example, our cooperative education program just sent over 1,000 of our students out to work for a six-month co-op cycle all over Boston, the United States, and the world. Our undergraduates enter professions where they learn what many college graduates learn only as alumni, and they come back to us stronger and more confident than when they left—and they bring the world with them. We apply experiential learning to our international study programs, sending students abroad to programs all over the globe. We also offer a unique program, called Dialogues of Civilization, where our faculty lead student groups on programs in other countries to explore and study first hand other cultures. We also offer a multitude of opportunities for students to do undergraduate research, service and service learning, and internships. By combining classroom excellence with a strong experiential component, we offer our students the opportunity to grow stronger and more confident about their academic and career goals. As a former faculty member and chair of a department, as well as dean, I have had the honor of watching our students grow and transform themselves in rich and deep ways. They use their strength and confidence to get into medical, law, and graduate schools, as well as to get better jobs after graduation.
It is wonderful to be dean of a college with its head in the clouds as a rigorous top academic institution, but at the same time with its feet on the ground as a real citizen of Boston and the world outside our campus. The unique ongoing conversation we have with the real world makes our whole institution stronger as we work on the most challenging issues of pure theory and art, as well as on real-world problems. As a result, we in the college know each other better and work together more in disciplinary and interdisciplinary ways to create and disseminate knowledge. It is the unique blend of academic and experiential education that I believe has worked to produce the very significant rise in our reputation as a university, leading to faculty who want to work here and students who want to go here. It is also just fun to be growing as individuals and as an institution.
James R. Stellar
Dean