Common Curriculum
The common curriculum is MBU Foundations plus 10 courses designed to teach essential skills needed to thrive in today’s world. Yes, all undergraduates are required to complete these courses. However, these are not your typical Gen Ed classes.
With courses like Discovery, Voyages, and Narratives, we’ve created a curriculum you won’t feel like you have to do. Instead it’s something you get to do.
Establish a strong foundation for future success.
Freshman year
MBU Foundations
Learn important college success skills during the first semester of your first year.
Composition
Learn to evaluate and produce persuasive writing across a variety of genres and forms.
Discovery
Explore and implement the scientific process, from formulating hypotheses to generating conclusions.
Narratives
Study what it means to be human through the exploration of history, philosophy, religious studies, literature, languages, art, and media.
Communities
Explore relationships between local and global communities, including how individuals, societies, and cultures connect and change across boundaries.
Develop more sophisticated modes of analysis.
Sophomore Year
Creativity
Consider creativity in the arts through the lens of imagination, self-expression, cultural significance, narrative, and the impact on society.
Decisions
Use social science methods and models to explore, describe, explain, and predict phenomena in human society.
Data
Learn how to interpret and understand the world by creating, describing, and analyzing charts, graphs, and statistics.
Environments
Delve into the complex interplay between human societies, natural environments, and climate change.
Deepen your understanding of individuals and societies.
Junior Year
Voyages
Build awareness of global diversity through explorations of languages, arts, literature, cultures, and social or economic structures. (Foreign language and study abroad and away courses fulfill the requirement.)
Identities
Learn how lived experience is informed by privilege, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and more. (A variety of gender and diversity courses fulfill this requirement.)