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Academics: Majors & Minors: Trinity College of Arts and Sciences

Trinity College of Arts and Sciences  |  Pratt School of Engineering  |  Nicholas School of the Environment  |  Sanford School of Public Policy

Trinity College of Arts and Sciences is Duke's undergraduate liberal arts college. Considered to be one of the best undergraduate educational programs in the United States, Trinity College provides a curriculum through the undergraduate years that responds to individual talents and aspirations while ensuring that students know how to think and discern.

The undergraduate program is led by a diverse faculty of nearly 600 educators who are all outstanding in their fields and who know how to challenge and inspire students. Opportunities for research, service, leadership, internships, and study abroad abound, and to ensure that all students have the resources to shape their educational goals, the liberal arts program emphasizes partnerships among academic fields.

At the core of the Trinity College Curriculum are four sets of requirements:

  • The Areas of Knowledge requirements (arts, literatures, and performance; civilizations; social sciences; natural sciences; and quantitative studies) lend breadth to a student's education by introducing students to the full range of disciplines taught at Duke.
  • The Modes of Inquiry requirements (cross-cultural inquiry; science, technology, and society; ethical inquiry; foreign language; writing; and research) ensure that students will be exposed to different ways of learning and thinking.
  • Small Group Learning Experiences provide opportunities to engage in discussion, develop skills, refine judgment, develop new ideas, and defend existing ones when challenged.
  • Finally, the Major provides depth of exposure to one discipline and its methodologies so that students can develop a degree of expertise in that area.

Students can choose courses in nearly 100 different programs, including humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, and mathematics. They can pursue one of Trinity College's 36 existing degree programs (known as Program I), or they can design their own program of study with the help of a faculty advisor (known as Program II). Both programs lead to the Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree, and each requires 34 semester courses to satisfy the degree requirements.

Program I provides an innovative, rigorous curriculum in many fields that is meant to encourage breadth as well as depth, and provide structure as well as flexibility. Degree programs range from African and African-American Studies to Physics, International Comparative Studies to Earth and Ocean Sciences, Biology to Theater Studies—all of which help students engage a wide variety of subjects.

Through Program II, students work with faculty advisors to create an individualized course of study. Students who pursue Program II have academic interests that cannot be satisfied by one of the existing majors and choose to design programs of study that meet their unique needs. Program II gives these students the chance to focus specifically on their areas of greatest interest.

The Latest Humanities and Social Sciences News at Duke

A former warehouse across from the main entrance to Duke’s East Campus has just been transformed into the Arts, Culture, and Technology Studios: a state-of-the-art multimedia center where visual artists and composers will collaborate to create new forms of art and where faculty from a variety of disciplines will create new works in digital music, digital graphics, printmaking, artists’ books, photography, painting, drawing and other new media.
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Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

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