Major: area of concentrated studies during you college career. At Eckerd, this is your discipline/department (e.g., Communication, Physics, Psychology, etc.). The discipline is house within the Collegium (see What is a Collegium)
Degree: is the credential with you which you graduate, BA or BS. It is the overarching structure of your education at Eckerd. It includes your general education courses as well as those in your major and minor.
They work together! Your major is part of your degree and you can’t earn your degree without your major. Your major determines if you earn a BA or a BS.
The academic departments, called disciplines, are grouped together in collegia, based upon the method of inquiry and intellectual discipline necessary to master the material.
All first-year students are part of the Foundations Collegium.
Through the Foundations Collegium, students participate in Autumn Term and take the core first-year course sequence, Human Experience.
Once students declare a major, they join the collegium of their major.
Members of the Behavioral Sciences Collegium believe that the urgent problems of today—
racism,
gender discrimination,
climate change,
population pressures,
animal welfare,
hunger,
poverty, and
inequality
—are problems of human behavior and social institutions.
Majors
animal studies,
business administration,
economics,
environmental studies,
international relations and global affairs,
management,
political science,
psychology, and
sociology.
The Collegium seeks to promote an understanding of the breadth of human cultures worldwide through the study of foreign languages, area studies, and related disciplines.
Majors:
Language study in Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, or Spanish can be integrated into a major program or an interdisciplinary concentration with another discipline or it may serve to round out a student’s liberal arts program. Other majors in the Comparative Cultures Collegium include anthropology, international studies, and international business.
The Natural Sciences Collegium strives to educate students in the scientific method and the important ideas of contemporary science, and to impart an understanding of the social, economic, and ethical implications of scientific discoveries.
Majors in the Natural Sciences Collegium include biology, chemistry, biochemistry, computer science, physics, math, geosciences, and marine science.
The Creative Arts Collegium is dedicated to promoting the development of creativity in each person and the integration of the intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the self.
The majors in the Creative Arts Collegium include art, music, theatre, creative writing, interdisciplinary arts, communication, and human development.
The Letters Collegium is dedicated to understanding more fully what it means to be human and to critiquing ourselves, our institutions, and our world based on the investigation of events, artifacts, texts, and works of art.
Majors in the Letters Collegium include American studies, humanities, philosophy, religious studies, classics and ancient studies, literature, comparative literature, history, East Asian studies, women’s and gender studies, and film studies.