The Arts & Science Program is designed to provide students with a broad-based, interdisciplinary education. Its curriculum has been planned with three major objectives in mind:
- to enable substantial work in both the arts and the sciences
- to develop skills in writing, speaking, and critical reasoning
- to foster the art of scholarly inquiry into issues of public concern
The Arts & Science Program stresses active, self-directed, and cooperative learning, with emphasis on social awareness and the development of a wide range of transferable skills.
The Program is unique in offering an extensive integrated core curriculum, which bridges the divide between the arts and the sciences and also between academic study and social engagement. The majority of its graduates go on to graduate or professional schools in a wide variety of fields.
This is a limited enrolment, interdisciplinary program that brings students and faculty together in a lively intellectual environment conducive to collaborative learning.
Over its almost 40 years as one of Canadas most innovative programs, Arts & Science at McMaster has established an enviable reputation for providing an educational environment that equips its graduates to excel in work and/or further study in a wide variety of fields.
The limited size of the program facilitates close relationships between students, both academically and personally, while small class and tutorial sizes promote lively interaction between professors and students.
The individual and collective expertise of Arts & Science faculty members, many of them award-winning teachers, enables the Program to continue to forge new ground in undergraduate education. Our instructors, who have diverse disciplinary backgrounds, work closely with students in the creative process of interdisciplinary inquiry.
In the B.Arts Sc. Honours degree, students take specifically designed ARTSSCI courses as well as electives. Students can use their electives to pursue a Combined Honours Program (Arts & Science may be combined with over thirty different subjects from across the University), to focus on a particular area (a minor), or to satisfy broad interests. The integrated set of required courses, offered exclusively to Arts & Science students, include Inquiry courses, which cover a range of disciplines and focus on the development of problem-based learning and critical thinking skills.
Electives, experiential learning initiatives, and exchange opportunities allow students to tread new paths of discovery, while individual study and fourth-year thesis courses provide an opportunity to work with McMaster researchers from across the University. The program prepares students for a variety of future endeavours, and has a tradition of producing graduates who shine in a remarkable array of meaningful careers.