Curriculum Overview
The Trinity College Curriculum will help to prepare you well for full and successful participation in the world after you graduate. Among the goals of a liberal education at Duke may be counted the following:
- Developing critical skills and judgment;
- Learning how to access, synthesize, and communicate knowledge effectively;
- Acquiring perspective on current and historical events;
- Conducting research and solving problems; and
- Developing tenacity and a capacity for hard work.
The decisions you make throughout your four years at Duke will define the course of your studies and reflect your values. By approaching the choices you will face in a thoughtful, careful way, you can fruitfully pursue the goals of a liberal education.
The Trinity College Curriculum, specifically the graduation requirements that you must fulfill, will help you to chart a course through the undergraduate years that will be responsive to your talents and aspirations and prepare you well for whatever career you have in mind. At the core of the Curriculum are four sets of curricular requirements:
- The Areas of Knowledge requirements lend breadth to your education by introducing you to the full range of disciplines taught at Duke.
- The Modes of Inquiry requirements insure that you will engage certain important cross-cutting intellectual themes and prepare you to leave Duke having developed proficiencies that will serve you in later life.
- The Small Group Learning Experiences assure opportunities to engage in discussion, develop skills, refine judgment, and defend ideas when challenged.
- Finally, the Major provides depth of exposure to one discipline and its methodologies that will enable you to develop a degree of expertise in that area.
See Graduation Requirements for a detailed description of the curricular requirements.
How should you approach these four sets of curricular requirements? If, in your planning, you remember that you have four years to fulfill graduation requirements, you may be less inclined to regard completion of your general education requirements and your major as two separate and distinct enterprises. Focusing on either one at the expense of the other has its drawbacks. If you try to get the general education requirements out of the way first, you may not test your interests sufficiently to enable you to identify a suitable major, and you run the risk of taking courses that do not interest you. If you try to take too many courses in your prospective major early on, you may have little opportunity to discover some other academic field that might suit you even better. You might also find yourself completing general education requirements at the end of your Duke career when you should be most fully engaged in your area of special academic interest. A more balanced approach will allow you to explore the Curriculum and the various disciplines at Duke, focus your search for a major, and enable you to make appropriate progress toward fulfillment of graduation requirements all at the same time. General education and major requirements should, ideally, complement one another.
