Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy

at York University - School of Continuing Studies Canada

Violations of human rights occur across a broad range of social, economic and cultural areas as well as within the civil and political order. Today we are faced with local and global issues that, in one way or another, impact all of us: denial of education or basic health rights; surveillance and suppression of speech; polarization of incomes or denial of economic security; atrocities of military occupation and war.

Students in York's innovative Human Rights & Equity Studies program explore the roots of human rights violations as they occur across a broad range of social, economic and cultural areas. You'll tackle local and global issues, that, in one way or another, impact us all:

• Denial of education or basic health rights;
• Surveillance and suppression of speech;
• Polarization of incomes or denial of economic security;
• Atrocities of military occupation and war.

York's program investigates rights and equity concerns through a range of disciplinary lenses. Courses drawn from units across York confront problems of basic rights involving physical, emotional and economic security, cultural autonomy and freedom of political expression, viewing rights in relation to the whole person.

• Gain multidisciplinary knowledge by exploring human rights and equity in a diverse array of fields, including sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, social work, economics, health, education and the arts.
• Core professors are experts in social and cultural rights and equity concerns related to health and healthcare, economic inequality and poverty, work and unemployment, and social and labour policy.

Digital Media focuses on the study of 3D simulations and animation, artistic theories and cultural impact. It inspires people with imaginative digital art installations or design of the next generation gaming technology. Using code and programming as tools for creative expression, digital media specialists develop original digital media objects and experiences such as mobile apps, immersive and 3D environments, data visualization, interactive performance and more. 

What You'll Learn 
As a Digital Media student, you will learn about the raw tools that help create digital imagery and sound, including animation and 3D simulations. You will also study larger concepts like artistic theories and the cultural impact of digital media on the world. Most importantly, you will learn to create.

You will begin the program by completing a common core of courses in first year. You will select from one of three specializations based on your interest: Digital Media Development (DMD) that has a greater focus on computer science, Digital Media Arts (DMA) that focuses more on fine arts or the brand new Digital Media Game Arts. 

From Ancient Greece came many of the Western world's cultural values and social institutions, while contemporary Greece, situated at the intersection between Europe and the Middle East, is a vitally important modern nation. In our exciting Hellenic Studies program you'll have the opportunity to explore the ancient and modern periods in Greece through a curriculum that integrates language study with courses covering Greek literature, culture and history.

As well as providing a formal degree program for students interested in ancient and modern Greece, Hellenic Studies will help you develop critical reading, analysis and writing skills and will give you an excellent range of experience in art criticism, language work, historical analysis, literary and philosophical study.

• Participate in connections with universities in Greece and with Hellenic Studies programs around the globe.
• Toronto’s vibrant Greek community, through the creation of the Hellenic Heritage Chair, has made our program the leading centre of Hellenic Studies in Ontario and beyond. The Hellenic Heritage Foundation of Toronto endowed the Hellenic Heritage Chair in Modern Greece with $2 million in 2002. York also contributed $500,000 to the Chair.

Culture & Expression explores the catalytic relationship between the creative human imagination and the cultural settings that ignite it.
Literature, architecture, popular culture, the arts, media and technology provide areas of study for Culture & Expression courses. This program investigates how meaning, embedded in form, offers ways of understanding culture as a complex expression that animates human imagination and life. It encourages speculation on how this expression operates in social, political and cultural settings.

Through the lens of humanities studies, you examine historical and contemporary themes. Explore how themes are expressed, refracted, and reflected through a range of cultural forms such as cinema, music, literature and various forms of popular and material culture. Theoretical courses delve into the core of ideological "meaning" in culture, analyzing the social, economic and political contexts in which culture manifests itself.

Highlights of studying Culture & Expression at York:

• Explore exciting expressions of human creativity in popular culture, architecture, media and technology.
• Learn how a broad range of cultural and artistic forms convey social, political and philosophical concerns.
• Courses are drawn from areas including the humanities, communication studies, sociology, gender and women's studies, popular and material culture studies - providing you with personal choice and flexibility.
• Our professors are leading researchers in their fields: modernism, material culture, digital humanities, documentary film and critical studies in Black Canadian Culture.
• Courses are drawn from areas including the humanities, communication studies, sociology and women's studies - providing you with personal choice and flexibility.

Our professors are leading researchers in their fields. They include:

• Elicia Clements, author, Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language
• Leslie Sanders, author, Black Canadian Studies Certificate
• David Cecchetto, author, Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture
• Gail Vanstone, recipient of the 2010 Dean’s Award in Teaching Excellence.

The Cinema and Media Arts Program in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design is a unique interdisciplinary program combining traditional scholarship with extensive opportunities for engaged, hands-on learning in the field of Cinema and Media Arts.

The Cinema and Media Studies Program focuses on history, theory, criticism, curation, and producing of cinema and other media-rich arts, such as gaming and social media forms. Students learn to understand film, television and other moving images in relation to history, criticism, technology and aesthetics. They encounter a diverse world of cinema and media and learn vital skills that will help them become leaders in our future world – a world that is increasingly interconnected through modes of communication and interaction that relay cinematic and moving images.

Through coursework students will develop specialized knowledge and critical understanding of multiple fields of cinema and media studies including genre, authorship, national and transnational cinemas, technologies of the image, and cultural theory. Students wishing to pursue careers in the cultural industries will have the opportunity for engaged learning in the areas of producing, marketing, the business of film, curating, and festival programming. In addition to practice-based workshops and specialized assignments, students can expect opportunities for placements and internships with a broad array of organizations, such as local film and media festivals such as TIFF and Images Festival, independent distribution companies, the National Film Board of Canada, the Ontario Art Gallery, film magazines and journals, independent production companies, archives, and many more.

Graduates of the ITEC program are uniquely positioned to plan, design, build and administer information systems.

Information technology deals with information and its use in organizations and society. York's Information Technology (ITEC) programs provide you with the educational background to pursue an exciting career in the application of computers to a variety of tasks faced by organizations today.

Unlike traditional computer science and engineering programs, which focus on developing broad computing skills, ITEC focuses on applications of software and information technologies and how they can be systematically designed and developed to meet critical business and organizational problems.
 
This way, ITEC prepares you to become a versatile Information Technology professional who possesses a strongly developed intuition about business, organizational and societal needs, and combines it with robust technical and methodological skills to analyze, design, implement, customize and manage information technologies to fulfil those needs. 

Bachelor of Commerce – Information Technology

The BCom - ITEC ensures that in addition to essential technical and methodological skills, graduates have a deeper and broader understanding of business and commerce. Thus, courses on accounting, marketing, organization behaviour, enterprise resource planning and strategy are added to the list of courses. 

Students in our BCom - ITEC program will pursue specializations in:

• Business Systems Analysis: will prepare you for a career as an information technology analyst, systems analyst or information technology consultant.
• E-Commerce Development: gives you the technical knowledge required for the design and development of consumer and business-to-business electronic commerce systems.
• Information Technology Auditing & Assurance: responds to the growing demand for information system audit, control and security professionals. This stream was developed in close consultation with the Information Systems Audit and Control Association and will be of interest to students seeking the certified Information Systems Auditor designation.

4 years honours option also avilable for this program. For more information please visit program page.

The study of English literature explores literary history for its relation to current culture, re-thinks the dynamics of the book as a visual medium and examines the fundamental changes to knowledge and language created within our gendered, post-colonial world.

We offer a full range of English literature courses from the medieval period to the present, with particular strengths in contemporary poetry, popular literature, Canadian, American, African, South Asia and Caribbean literatures. The program invites you to explore some of the world's greatest literary works while developing critical thinking, reading and writing skills. You can choose from courses in:

• Poetry
• Drama
• Fiction
• Satire
• Folklore
• Literary criticism
• Critical theory
• Gender studies
• Stylistics and poetics
• Comics and cartoons
• Science fiction
• Children's literature
• Travel writing

The English Department is the first and best place for considered and disciplined responses to the discourse and images that are shaped by the constantly changing technologies of a word-based world, and it is through the study of English literature that the critical skills necessary for understanding the past and the present are acquired.

Our goal is to provide you with a useful knowledge of literary works, both as art forms and as documents of human behaviour. By studying English literature, you will gain a vision of humanity as expressed in verbal art that crosses boundaries of time and place. Thanks to our location in the heart of the Greater Toronto Area, you can take advantage of the city's wide range of literary events including the Harbourfront Reading Series and Word on the Street.

Study in one of the largest Geography programs in any university in Canada. Whether you're pursuing your Bachelor of Science and focusing on physical geography or gaining expertise about human geography through a Bachelor of Arts, York's program offers you the world at your doorstep.

Geography is the science of place and space. Geographers ask where things are located on the surface of the earth, why they are located where they are, how places differ from one another, and how people interact with the environment. There are two main branches of geography: human geography and physical geography.

Geographers also study the linkages between human activity and natural systems. Geographers were, in fact, among the first scientists to sound the alarm that human-induced changes to the environment were beginning to threaten the balance of life itself. They are active in the study of global warming, desertification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, groundwater pollution, and flooding.

In the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Bachelor of Arts (BA) Geography program focuses on human geography - how people and their activities are distributed across the globe and how people create and sustain the places that make up the earth's surface. You'll learn how to use geographical theory and methodology to solve real-world problems that have a geographical dimension — urban and regional planning, transportation, tourism and international relations and more. Human geographers work in the fields of urban and regional planning, transportation, marketing, real estate, tourism, and international business.

• We are addressing some of the most pressing issues facing human kind today.
• We are committed to hands-on learning, using modern technologies and doing field work to get the facts on the ground, whether they are on the streets of Toronto or in the streams of the Arctic.
• You will be able to use our range of impressive facilities for computing and research. For example, the Geoinformatics Research Lab, the climate laboratory and a web development facility.
• You'll also have the opportunity to immerse yourself in our extensive map library.
• Why not check out the Undergraduate Geography Students Club and take advantage of Alumni Career events during the school year.

Our extensive facilities and our Biochemistry Lab – outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment – provides  you with hands-on training in the laboratory right from the very first year.

The Biochemistry program at York is your gateway to an exciting and rapidly evolving field. Biochemistry is the study of the chemistry of life, and as all fields of biology are increasingly seeking understanding at the molecular and submolecular levels, Biochemistry continues to be vitally important to advancing many areas of biology and biomedical science.

Biochemistry looks at topics such as molecular genetics, physiology and the treatment of disease. As a Biochemistry student you will explore the structure and properties of biological molecules and the relationship between their chemical structure and their function in living systems.

Many areas of everyday life owe their development or even existence to biochemists: medical products and diagnostics, new food and its safety, crop improvement, cosmetics and forensic science.

• York's Biochemistry professors include Sergey Krylov, Canada Research Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry and David Hood, Canada Research Chair in Cell Physiology.
• York houses the Centre for Research on Biomolecular Interactions which houses more than 70 professors, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students. The Centre uses cutting-edge approaches to gain full understanding of key molecular players and events that can lead to disease, and by doing so, hopes to address prevention and future treatment of many diseases.

The Biochemistry program at York is your gateway to an exciting and rapidly evolving field. Biochemistry is the study of the chemistry of life, and as all fields of biology are increasingly seeking understanding at the molecular and submolecular levels, Biochemistry continues to be vitally important to advancing many areas of biology and biomedical science, including molecular genetics, physiology and the treatment of disease. As a Biochemistry student you will explore the structure and properties of biological molecules and the relationship between their chemical structure and their function in living systems.

This four-year program provides you with hands-on training in the laboratory right from the very first year. A fourth-year research project serves as the capstone course of your degree, preparing you for many challenging careers. York Biochemistry students get meaningful and well paid jobs in research, in industry and in teaching. Others go on to pursue graduate studies, here and at other prestigious universities in Canada and abroad. Many enter professional schools in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, law and business.

The Faculty of Science offers Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree programs in Applied Mathematics.
Applied mathematics or computational sciences encompasses the many analytical and numerical methods used to solve scientific problems. It is at the core of many disciplines ranging from engineering and science to business and economics. It is essential to be able to apply many different mathematical techniques and to handle problems involving statistical data. It is also necessary to be able to take a practical problem, from engineering for example, and turn it into a mathematical problem; this is referred to as mathematical modeling.

Applied mathematics includes the area of scientific computing, which involves many components of computational processes — numerical analysis, algorithms for machines with vector and parallel architectures, visualization, simulation and computer-aided design.
Applied mathematicians use equations and computer simulations to:

• Design computer chips;
• Set airfare and insurance rates;
• Model electric power grids;
• Study genetic engineering;
• Create new automobile and airplane design;
• Study global climate change.

It is mathematics used to model and solve practical, real-world problems.
The Applied Mathematics (BA) program aims to give students a solid base of knowledge of mathematics which has important applications in fields such as computer science, physics, earth and atmospheric science, chemistry, biology, psychology and also in economics and business. Bachelor of Arts students are given the opportunity to take electives in other areas of interest, such as business administration.

Students in Applied Mathematics may pursue a course of study leading to a Bachelor of Science (BSc), combining their studies in applied mathematics with another subject such as physics, earth and atmospheric science, biology or computer science.