College Enhances Curriculum
Campus News
by Matt Getty
April 1, 2010
Dickinson recently broadened the scope of its useful liberal-arts education by adding a security-studies certificate program and 11 graduate-school partnership programs in subjects ranging from nursing to business, to global studies and management.
The security-studies certificate program links international relations, U.S. foreign policy and national-security studies to prepare students to tackle contemporary challenges in national and transnational security and defense.
“Security is often discussed in very, very narrow fashions,” says Neil Weissman, provost and dean of the college. “The broader issues, including the ability to connect dots [and] think of things in a network sort of way, that’s something that has a real liberal-arts dimension.”
The college also has built upon its health-studies certificate and pre-health programs with five medical-program partnerships with Thomas Jefferson and Johns Hopkins universities. The agreement with the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing offers students several options for pairing their Dickinson degree with a major in nursing or a doctor of philosophy in nursing. The agreement with Thomas Jefferson guarantees Dickinson students with a 3.3 GPA priority admission into the public-health program at Jefferson Medical College and access to scholarships.
In addition to the health programs, the college added partnerships with Johns Hopkins and the University of Rochester to make it easier for students to enter MBA programs at those schools. Agreements with the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and the University of Málaga in Málaga, Spain, do the same for international graduate study at those schools. Similar agreements with other partner institutions abroad are also in the final stages.
“Our ability to develop these articulation agreements underlines the quality of what goes on here,” says Weissman. “The schools with which we’ve developed articulations are very anxious to have our students, and they’re willing to extend advantages to them based on the quality of the Dickinson education.”
These new partnerships add to an existing relationship with The Dickinson School of Law of Pennsylvania State University, which allows students to earn a bachelor’s degree and law degree in six years, and partnerships with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Case Western Reserve University, through which Dickinson students can add engineering to their Dickinson bachelor’s degrees.
A new agreement with the Thunderbird School of International Management offers rising seniors with a 3.3 GPA the opportunity to earn a certificate in advanced global studies before graduation, which would then guarantee them admission into the second term of Thunderbird’s master of arts in global affairs or master of science in global management programs after graduation.