Probably one of the reasons you’ve been looking forward to going to college is that you finally get to choose your own classes. You’ll choose a major, and most majors allow you quite a few choices about which courses to take. However, the Mount St. Mary’s core curriculum limits your choices in some ways, and you rightly wonder why. First, we believe it would be a mistake for you to take courses only in your favorite subjects or primarily in your major. As you begin a career or job, employers will be looking for people flexible in their abilities, who have not only certain technical skills but also skills and attitudes that help them understand the big picture, listen and communicate well, think on their own, and work well with others. Moreover, you will likely change jobs or careers several times in your lives, and this also will require you to be flexible. So, one reason for our core curriculum is to help you to develop this flexibility, these skills, and these attitudes, all of which lie beyond the skills you develop in studying material relevant to your major.

We also believe that part of an excellent college experience involves becoming a contributing member of a community of learners who read some of the same texts, talk about some of the same issues, and help each other mature intellectually. So, a second reason for our core curriculum is that it contributes to building a community based upon shared academic experiences.

There’s a third reason for our core curriculum. We believe that education doesn’t have to do solely with getting a job or getting a better job. We believe that getting an education has to do with becoming more fully human, where this involves becoming aware of who you are as an individual, who you are in your culture, who you are in a historical sense, who you are in a scientific sense, and who you are as a human being in relation to the divine. To gain this awareness, you’ll need an introduction to various disciplines across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences which address in various ways what it means to be human and how you can contribute to the common good of humans. In order to be a full citizen of your neighborhood and town, of your county and state, and even of this country, you need to have all of these understandings of yourself. Our core curriculum helps you to develop these understandings.