What are the breadth requirements for arts and sciences students?? The page on the school website gave me an error: not found message :/
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hey there,
yeah so it seems like the artsci website is… broken? or at least the version of it linked to nearly every single google search is chock-full of 404s. trust me, i’m not the biggest fan of this either because it makes my job as an aska harder.
i’m sure someone at the uni is working hard on getting things back on track, though. in the meantime, i’d suggest you either do a search using the artsci search bar instead of google, because the page links you get from that shouldn’t be broken. otherwise, you may be able to find the information on other sites, and feel free to ask again if there’s anything you can’t find.
i did manage to find a working page that outlines the breadth requirements. there are 5, which i can outline for you here since i’m answering this question anyway:
BREADTH 1: “creative and cultural representations” — involves things like creative writing, anthropology, cinema studies, drama, and the like. the artsiest of artsci. want to study tolkien or game of thrones? talk about murder in fiction? find out what the heck a cossack is? these are the courses you’re looking for.
BREADTH 2: “thought, belief, and behaviour”– are your parents nagging you to ‘learn a third language, jimmy, it’ll help prevent the early onset of alzheimer’s’? (maybe this is a me problem.) are you into philosophy? do debates on morality get you going? do you like to do a lot of thinking for the sake of thinking? chances are you’ll already have this breadth pat down.
BREADTH 3: “society and its institutions”–do you self-identify as a history buff? have a burning vendetta against gender violence that you want to explore in the classroom? want to go paddling on the great lakes for credit? hell yeah you do. breadth 3 is for you.
BREADTH 4: “living things and their environment” — is your life’s goal to cure some obscure but life-threatening disease? do you want to talk about drugs? dementia? membranes? TREES?
BREADTH 5: “the physical and mathematical universes” — do chem labs spark joy for you? are numbers your idea of a good time? does thinking about the human genome fill you with awe and wonder? breadth 5, my friend, is your vibe.
–i mean, for a lot of these you don’t really have a choice. to fulfill your breadth requirements, you’ll need to take either:
- one full credit from four categories OR
- one full credit from three, and a half credit from the remaining two
usually breadth requirements aren’t too bad, though. if your strengths lean more so to one of either humanities or the sciences, you can definitely find breadth requirement courses that won’t pose as much as a challenge for you. for example, i managed to get my breadth 5 credit with a first-year astronomy course that didn’t require me to do any math at all. i’m sure there are also humanities courses designed for the sciences. i would encourage you to get these requirements out of the way early, though, especially since the easiest breadth courses are restricted to first years (seminars and ones).
sorry for the wait getting this answered– i’ve been out of commission for a bit but i’m back now and will try to get through the backlog of questions. big THANK to everyone waiting!
cheers,
aska