PrincetonUniversityNew General Education Requirements
for the Class of 2000 and Beyond
Words of AdviceIf you are a candidate for the A.B. degree, your courses at Princeton will be divided roughly into three parts: those that fulfill general education requirements, those that are part of your major, and your electives, which might include courses you take to fulfill the requirements of a certificate program. If you are a candidate for the B.S.E. degree, you will have a more structured curriculum, but somewhere between a quarter and a third of your courses can come from the humanities and social sciences. But these are not hard and fast boundaries. Courses that fulfill distribution requirements may satisfy the prerequisites for your major; your elective courses are likely to satisfy distribution requirements; and your departmental course selection may be enriched by taking "cognates" from other departments that will count toward the major. Hence, do not approach your course selection determined to get this or that out of the way. Rather, here are a few rules of thumb:
• You are expected to complete the writing requirement by the end of your sophomore year. The attention to your writing will be very helpful in other courses with a significant writing component, as well as in your independent work.
• Complete the foreign language requirement on a reasonable time schedule, and certainly by the end of your junior year. If you are beginning a language at Princeton, you will have to take it in three or four consecutive terms. If you are continuing a language, the longer you wait, the more you will have forgotten.
• Complete the distribution requirement you least want to do as early as possible. First, you may find that you quite enjoy it, so why live with the dread of anticipation? Second, it is likely to be more onerous when you are in the midst of your junior independent work, design project, or even senior thesis.
• Look at the whole set of distribution requirements as guides to the treasures of the curriculum. Pick courses whose subject matter is unfamiliar to you, those that may challenge your thinking and open areas of knowledge.
• If you are not sure about your major, a course that fulfills a distribution requirement may point you to a new field of study.
• If you are hesitating between two majors, courses that fulfill a distribution requirement may enable you to acquire the necessary foundation for either concentration and, in the process, help you make a decision between them.
You are the fourth class to be presented with these new general education requirements. We hope you will benefit from the years of thought and deliberation that went into constructing them.
On the next few pages, you will find some model pathways through the curriculum. These range from programs of study that allow substantial freedom in choosing electives, to those that are constrained by the nature of the major, in combination with other academic or preprofessional goals the student may want to pursue (for example, an English major who is also a premed, or a molecular biology major who is pursuing a certificate in the language and culture program, will have a significantly more well defined program than a student who is simply a religion or politics major).
It is of course the case that you have substantial choice within each of the categoriesso where we indicate PHI 203 for "Epistemology and Cognition," you may decide, for example, to take PSY 208, REL 215, ANT201, or a freshman seminar that has the EC classification, or any of the other EC courses. Where we indicate MAT 103 for "Quantitative Reasoning," you may elect COS 111, ORF 201, or an appropriate freshman seminar, or any of the other QR courses.
Remember that these examples are designed not as prescriptions of what you should do, but rather as different models of what a program of study might look like. Remember, too, that we have by no means exhausted the full range of majors and certificate programs that our students can and do elect. You will have ample opportunity to discuss your own interests and develop the curricular path you would like to follow in meetings with your academic adviser, your director of studies, and departmental representatives and program directors.