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Our entire faculty spends the great
majority of its teaching hours in the undergraduate classroom. Many of
us teach in the College Core Curriculum; all of us teach undergraduate
lecture courses and seminars; most of us regularly
supervise senior theses and independent studies. Teaching Columbia and Barnard undergraduates is among our greatest privileges.
Our undergraduate curriculum covers most areas of the world and most
periods of written history. Our courses employ many different
approaches to the past. We emphasize no particular brand of history,
no single interpretive model, and we encourage our students to
experiment with a wide range of ideas. Our principal goal in the
undergraduate classroom is to develop the intellectual breadth and
analytical skills of our students. To that end, our courses emphasize
working with both primary and secondary sources and developing acuity in critical
writing.
The
heart of our undergraduate curriculum are our seminars – small,
intensive courses taught, as are all our courses, by members of the
faculty. They are normally limited to fifteen students each, and they
involve reading, discussion, and writing. Every undergraduate major is
required to take at least two of them.
Students who wish to be considered for departmental honors in history
must also
write a senior thesis. An preparatory course combining lecture and workshop components, Historical Theories and Methods (HIST W2901), introduces students to the pursuit of scholarly history in
preparation for the writing of the thesis. There are two avenues for writing the thesis. One is the
senior thesis seminar, a two-semester course that engages a group of
students in the process of producing a serious work of research and
that offers guidance and collaboration. The other method of writing a
thesis is to work directly with a member of the faculty for one or both
semesters while receiving credit for independent study. About 40
percent of our students write senior essays in any given year.
Some of our undergraduate majors go on to careers in academia, but most
do not. We believe that the study of history offers a sound background
for many careers and, perhaps more important, valuable preparation for
becoming a knowledgeable and engaged citizen.
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