General Education Cluster Curriculum

The Cluster Concept to Humanities and Social Science Core Courses

TCS offers elective courses that fulfill Poly’s undergraduate requirement for courses in humanities and social sciences—part of the undergraduate core curriculum.  These courses explore the relations among science, technology, and society from three general approaches and modes of inquiry: Culture, Arts and Media (CAM); Science, Technology and Society (STS); and Society, Environment and Globalization (SEG). This integrated approach to science, technology, and the humanities and social sciences provides engineering and science majors with a concrete and focused foundation for their fields.

Clusters 

Culture, Arts and Media (CAM)

The CAM cluster explores how cultural practices and artifacts in a wide range of media reflect, influence, and interact with developments in science and technology. Courses are based on philosophy, media studies, music, literary studies, art history, rhetoric, and anthropology. 

Science, Technology and Society (STS)

STS cluster courses explore the interrelationships among science, technology, culture, and society. STS unites and investigates a myriad of disciplines, including history, philosophy, rhetoric, literary studies, and sociology. The questions posed are: How do science and technology shape society? How do social processes frame scientific and technological enterprises? What is the relationship between the content of scientific and technological knowledge and the social and intellectual context in which it is created?  

Society, Environment and Globalization (SEG)

Courses in this cluster address the way the critical areas of society, environment, and globalization are interlinked in the way they affect the experience of modern life. Coming from the complementary perspectives of the humanities and social sciences, SEG courses provide students with a broad and multicultural perspective on how environmental issues and global exchange in this “flat world” are changing society, here and across the world.

Required Courses for fulfilling the NYU-Poly Humanities and Social Sciences Core Requirement (24 credits)

1. First-Year Writing Requirement (2 courses, 6 credits)

• Fall: EN 1013/W (or EN 1013H or EN 1033/W)  - This College Writing Workshop is taught by EN faculty and adjunct faculty.

• Spring: HUSS 1023/W (or EN 1203H or EN 1233/W) - First-Year Writing Seminar. This writing-intensive course, taught by TCS faculty, examines variable topics (the non-ESL versions). This course (a) introduces students, in a small-seminar format, to core questions relating science and technology to the humanities and social sciences, (b) provides students with intensive practice in college-level writing, research and critical-thinking skills and (c) exposes first-year students and senior TCS faculty to each other in a small, intimate learning environment.

2. Humanities and Social Science Elective Requirement (6 courses, 18 credits)

Students may choose 6 humanities or social science courses from any TCS cluster (above). These 6 electives can be within a single cluster or across multiple clusters. For optimal breadth of experience, TCS encourages students to take electives across clusters and/or across disciplines within a cluster. These 6 humanities and social science electives must satisfy the following constraints:

• At least 1 of these 6 must be a 3xxx/4xxx level humanities or social science elective; and
• At least 1 of these 6 must be a writing- intensive elective, labeled by “W” in the course listings the semester it is offered.

TCS Elective Offerings

Go to our list of Electives to find first-year writing courses and courses for each cluster. Links to course descriptions are also available on that page.