Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum, WSU

Pathways to Discovery

 

As Program Area Chair of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum at Worcester State University, I invite you to embrace the opportunity to create a liberal arts curriculum that broadens and deepens your sensibilities about the world within which you live and about what it means to be yourself within this world.

A liberal arts education has long been recognized as vital to preserving democracy. In order to vote wisely and choose our leaders carefully, a well-educated citizenry is paramount to the ideals of a democracy. Individual members of society must have breadth and depth of knowledge, must be critical thinkers maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism in order to avoid being swayed by baseless claims, irrelevant information and faulty arguments. The core courses in the curriculum will enhance your communication skills, your information literacy skills, and your quantitative analysis skills, all of which are vital to being an educated consumer of information and a life-long learner.

Moreover, a well-crafted Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum will fine-tune the skills and develop the attitudes that will promote success: personal and professional. The skills you will acquire will be both enduring and transferable. The attitudes you will be encouraged to assume will be open, inquiring, and challenging. In an environment where one changes employment and careers many times over a lifespan, where the problems one encounters cannot be solved from one disciplinary perspective, and where there is an ever-increasing amount of information at one’s fingertips, a liberal arts education is of increasing importance. The courses you choose in crafting your personalized liberal arts curriculum will complement and strengthen your major area of study by providing a broad base of knowledge for viewing problems through multiple lenses and seeking out creative solutions.

Equally important are the prospects a liberal education holds for discovering oneself. The liberal arts will encourage you to become self-aware, to challenge your views and values, to start you on a lifelong journey of personal growth.

The Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum at WSU holds open the door to many pathways allowing you, encouraging you, emboldening you to discover your own way and your own meaning while enriching your personal and professional growth.

 

Hemant Pendharkar, PhD
Professor and Program Area Chair