The goal of the College's curriculum is two-fold: to provide a general education across the broad range of arts and sciences disciplines and to offer a specialized education through a particular major. The College's general education curriculum complements the academic major by requiring students to pursue study in defined areas outside their chosen field. Through this coursework, you will build many important skills and encounter new ways of thinking, all of which will be useful not just in your major but also in your future life.
While this curriculum has certain requirements, you will have broad choices within each one. You will work with an advisor to determine which is right for you based on your interests and academic goals. Your advisor will help you see in interrelationships among disciplines and build a plan that takes full advantage of them. Instead of merely checking off a list of requirements as you complete them, you will be integrating these choices into a broader framework for your academic career at Penn. If you think of the College's curriculum this way, you will gain an education that is more than a collection of completed requirements and more than a string of individual courses. The faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences believe that these components together constitute an education best suited to enabling intelligent people to live fulfilling and productive lives in the 21st century.
