Learning by Design
Self-designed Majors Expand Opportunities It’s a familiar refrain for students coming into college: What major do I want to declare? But increasingly, as the world becomes more diverse and the job market becomes less specialized, Transylvania students are asking themselves a different question: What problem do I want to solve? Transy has 47 majors that, paired with a broad liberal arts curriculum, are designed to give students a breadth of knowledge and depth of preparation that empower them to take on a wide variety of careers and graduate schools. In a community like Transy’s, which is full of young explorers, there will always be those students whose education goals don’t fit neatly into one of those established major patterns. That’s why Transylvania has devoted itself to offering self-designed majors where students can tailor their individual paths to the world’s challenges they feel drawn to tackle. In close collaboration with faculty advisors and the Office of the Registrar, students can craft a curriculum built around their interests, knowing that the training they get here will uniquely prepare them for what lies ahead. “When I got to Transy, I was highly interested in biology and highly interested in computer science,” said Jerry Ramey ’11, “but the course loads of those majors didn’t work so well together for me.” Ramey met with biology professor Belinda Sly and then-computer science professor Tylene Garrett, who began working with him to craft a program that would
