Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy

at Shorelight Group - University of Massachusetts - Boston USA

Our goal as a program is to engage UMass Boston students actively with Anthropology's long-standing attention to issues of cultural diversity and to economic stability in both Western and non-Western regions combines with the discipline's holistic, evolutionary, deeply historical, critical, and cross-cultural approaches to offer students powerful resources for understanding current trends that affect their workplaces and their communities.

The first step in becoming an anthropology major is to enroll in Anthropology 105, 106, or 107. These courses provide an overview of the various subfields of anthropology, and all majors are required to take all three courses, although the order in which they are taken is up to the student. One of these courses, and in some cases all three, are prerequisites to nearly all upper-level anthropology courses.

UMass Boston's Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (MLLC) offers a diverse and engaging curriculum, with courses focusing on language, literary, cultural, and film studies. Our well-rounded faculty, made up of prolific scholars and dedicated teachers, is committed to creating a strong community of language learners, critical thinkers, and responsible global citizens, who are well prepared for the professional demands of today’s global markets. The department offers language courses in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Vietnamese as well as a wide variety of courses exploring the cultures of the Arabic-, Chinese-, French-, German-, Italian- and Japanese-speaking world taught in English.

The MS in accounting at UMass Boston is designed to prepare students for rewarding careers in the rapidly growing and changing field of accounting. Upon completion of the MSA, students will qualify for the Uniform Certified Public Accounting (CPA) Exam. The curriculum has been designed by the College of Management Accounting and Finance (AF) faculty in consultation with the AF Department’s Advisory Board.

The Economics department has approximately 400 declared undergraduate economics majors and serves students from many other departments and programs in the College of Liberal Arts, as well as students from other colleges of the university.  Currently 8% of declared undergraduate majors in the College of Liberal Arts have chosen Economics as their major. Their interests include Economic Development, Economic History, Environmental Issues, Health Economics, Industrial Organization, Immigration, International Economics, Labor Economics, Macroeconomics, Marxism, Monetary Theory, Political Economy of Race and Gender, Public Policy, Public Sector Economics, Social Welfare, Statistics and Econometrics, and Urban Economics. In addition to teaching, faculty members are engaged in research, writing, consulting, and other professional activities in their areas of interest.

UMass Boston's MBA is a streamlined 12-course, AACSB-accredited, immersive business program. focused on equipping you with the knowledge and skills you need to succeed as a business leader. The program is designed for professionals who want to gain a deeper understanding of the ever-changing business world to advance their career, change careers, or start their own business. Explore foundational business theories, gain experience with emerging technologies, and develop your analytical skills.

The goal of the Criminology and Criminal Justice major is to provide social scientific grounding to issues of crime and criminal justice. Through classes, internships and projects, students explore the nature of criminal behavior, its causes, the role of punishment, and prison as a social institution. Students learn about the criminal justice system, including law enforcement, corrections, and the law. Classes focus on issues central to criminal justice policies and practices, including mental illness, substance use and abuse, racial and ethnic inequality, gender and immigration. Differences among societies and historical trends are also addressed.

A major focus of the criminal justice faculty is to help students connect theory and research with policy and practice in the “real world.” Using current events, their own research and observations, and critical study of criminal justice systems, students better understand broader trends and future options. For example, during classroom discussion and debate, students may consider the rapidly increasing prison population and high cost of incarceration and ask: Who is being incarcerated and why? Do prison alternatives work? How do incarceration policies affect families and communities?

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston is an interdisciplinary field of study offering both a major (30 credits) and a minor (18 credits). The department includes introductory and intermediate courses, designed for all students who have a general interest in understanding how gender shapes our experiences, institutions, and social realities. More specialized upper-level courses primarily serve minors and majors. In addition to department (WGS) courses, we also offer an array of approved courses taught in other departments and programs (Art, English, Philosophy, Sociology, etc.). Many Women’s and Gender Studies courses fulfill general education requirements.

The Information Technology major offered through UMass Boston's College of Management is designed to offer pathways to highly-demanded careers in IT for both high school graduates and students of Massachusetts community colleges. Our small classes ensure personalized attention from IT faculty while our ties to the Greater Boston business and technical communities add an extra dimension of learning to our program of business information technology education. The IT major offers an “applications-path” format for students which includes a core of technical knowledge (nine courses), an area of specialization or track within IT (four or five courses, depending on track selection), three professional electives in an application or domain area (preferably outside of IT but within business), and two wrap-up courses (project management and IT capstone), in addition to general education requirements.

The IT major is project-based.  Every exercise assigned throughout the BSIT is designed to be of the kind that a student might encounter in his or her work: collaboration, competence, and outcomes assessment are the hallmark characteristics of the program.  Students will learn how to use IT to solve real-world problems within the context of a field in which they wish to work. Graduates will be familiar with, and be able to apply, the following core information technologies to solve business problems:

• Programming
• Networking
• Databases
• Web technologies

Business Intelligence (BI) is the technology that companies such as Amazon.com and Google use to take advantage of the enormous amount of data they collect and analyze. It is the technology with which Amazon.com knows what book to recommend you every time you login, Google knows how to rank the pages you are searching for, and banks decide whether to approve loan applications almost instantly.

The School for the Environment's nationally recognized Environmental Studies and Sustainability program emphasizes solutions integrating the humanities and social sciences with economics and business. As environmental and sustainability advocates, students customize their course of study, drawing from such diverse fields as anthropology, law, history, management, economics, and the sciences. In addition to coursework, this hands-on degree incorporates internships, research, cooperative education, and capstone course experiences in which students work as members of a multi-disciplinary team partnered with agencies and organizations throughout the Boston metropolitan area.

• Students will understand key sustainability concepts and become practiced at applying these principles to real world problems.
• Students will be able to use interdisciplinary and collaborative decision-making processes to devise practical solutions for managing environmental problems.
• Students will be able to analyze and critique sustainability issues balancing multiple disciplinary perspectives and research approaches (e.g., social, ecological, ethical, philosophical, political, and economic).
• Students will demonstrate analytical proficiencies, both quantitative and qualitative, to support data-driven decisions.
• Students will understand the system interactions and feedbacks between human activities and social institutions and the natural environment.
• Students will be experienced in communicating their learnings both in writing, visually, and orally, and for specific and general audiences.

The Information Technology major offered through UMass Boston's College of Management is designed to offer pathways to highly-demanded careers in IT for both high school graduates and students of Massachusetts community colleges. Our small classes ensure personalized attention from IT faculty while our ties to the Greater Boston business and technical communities add an extra dimension of learning to our program of business information technology education. The IT major offers an “applications-path” format for students which includes a core of technical knowledge (nine courses), an area of specialization or track within IT (four or five courses, depending on track selection), three professional electives in an application or domain area (preferably outside of IT but within business), and two wrap-up courses (project management and IT capstone), in addition to general education requirements.

The IT major is project based.  Every exercise assigned throughout the BSIT is designed to be of the kind that a student might encounter in his or her work: collaboration, competence, and outcomes assessment are the hallmark characteristics of the program.  Students will learn how to use IT to solve real-world problems within the context of a field in which they wish to work. Graduates will be familiar with, and be able to apply, the following core information technologies to solve business problems:

• Programming
• Networking
• Databases
• Web technologies

In addition, the BSIT program offers four specialization tracks: business intelligence1, computer forensics1, information architecture1 and systems administration.

Information Architecture Track
The Information Technology (IT) major is a jointly offered program between the College of Management (CM) and the College of Science and Mathematics (CSM) at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The BSIT consists of a common core of ten courses, a track of four to six courses in a particular area of specialization (the information architecture track requires four courses), a common capstone course, and three professional electives.