The Essential Education curriculum includes 13 requirements, divided into three segments: the first-year experience, the pathway, and activities for well-being and success. Additionally, students will complete an ePortfolio to integrate their learning within Essential Education, their major, and their extracurricular activities.
Note: Students who have completed the Michigan Transfer Agreement (MTA) are not required to participate in the Essential Education program.
Learn more about the individual components of the Essential Education curriculum using our helpful glossary of terms. You can also click on individual terms in the curriculum flowchart below to jump to the definition.
First-Year Experience (16 credits)
The first-year experience encourages critical thinking through a variety of disciplinary lenses. Students will build on their major with the following academic elements.
The Pathway (18 credits)
Students may choose one of two pathways, based on their individual needs and goals.
Essential Education Minor Pathway
This is the primary pathway for Essential Education, allowing students to earn a secondary credential alongside their undergraduate degree with no additional time or money. This option is encouraged for most students.
Essential Education minors are currently in development. Among the first batch of available options will be minors related to the following themes, with more to be developed soon:
- Diversity
- Leadership
- Sustainability
- Markets and Society
- Public Health
- Life Centered Design
- Global Cultures
- Creativity and Expression
- Law and Policy
- Entrepreneurship
Distribution Pathway
This flexible pathway allows for a more customizable experience within the Essential Education curriculum. This option may be more suitable for students who have a substantial number of AP and/or transfer credits.
Activities for Well-being and Success (3 credits)
These co-curricular course options support students' personal development, health, and well-being. Types of courses include physical well-being, creative expression, mental/emotional well-being, and success.
ePortfolio
This high-impact practice, which is completed through Essential Education courses, provides a structured opportunity for students to integrate their learning—including Essential Education, major courses, and extracurricular activities.
Glossary of Terms
Arts and Culture
Arts and Culture courses prepare students to critically engage with the socio-cultural contexts of our contemporary world. These courses develop skills for critical and creative analysis, encourage innovative problem solving, and support practices of engagement that empower students to be active participants in the creation of knowledge and understanding.
Communication Intensive
These courses focus on instruction in at least one form of communication—written, oral, etc. Assignments require students to draft and revise communication products in response to detailed feedback from peers and instructors. In the process, students learn to give actionable feedback and expand their knowledge of best practices in communication processes and products.
Composition
This course provides direct instruction in composition. Students examine and interpret communication practices and apply what they learn to their own written, aural, and visual compositions. Class projects ask students to communicate in a variety of modes and to attend to audience, purpose, and context.
Essential Education Experience
The Essential Education Experience helps to prepare our students for an ever-changing, dynamic, and diverse world. These active, hands-on experiences expand students' interactions with the greater society and allows for connections among their Essential Education courses. The experience is designed to increase students' social awareness, global understanding, and cultural competencies in a way that fosters lifelong global citizenship through their personal and professional lives.
Foundations in the Human World
The courses in this list are gateways to the disciplines that comprise the SHAPE units: Departments of Social Sciences, Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, Cognitive and Learning Sciences, and the College of Business. The Foundations in the Human World courses ensure that students have exposure to the arts, humanities, and/or human sciences in the first year to complement first-year courses in math, natural and physical sciences, and composition.
Intercultural Competency
The courses in the Intercultural Competency list are designed to support students in their development of a critical understanding of diversity, inclusion, power, and privilege—in addition but not limited to identities impacted by the intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, social class, and disability. Courses may address how political and economic processes impact people of different social identities, either domestically or internationally. Students explore how various groups navigate the world with different and ever-changing amounts of power and vulnerability, and gain the ability to be conscious and reflective in regard to their own implicit biases and potentially harmful actions in everyday social and professional contexts.
Math
The Math list includes common entry-level mathematical and quantitative-thinking courses for a variety of majors.
Michigan Tech Seminar
First-year students often struggle with the adjustment to college life. This requirement is designed to help students map out their path through college, to develop the habits and mindsets of successful students, and to build a sense of community and belonging with Michigan Tech. Courses fulfilling this requirement are also intended to introduce students to, and encourage an understanding of, the undergraduate student learning goals and their connection to modern skills desired by employers. Students will learn skills in reflection and folio thinking and will begin their ePortfolios.
Natural and Physical Science
The Natural and Physical Science list includes common entry-level courses in fields that help students understand how the world and universe around them work. Courses come from fields like biology, chemistry, ecology, geoscience, and physics.
SHAPE
SHAPE stands for Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy/Environment. Coined by the British Academy, the term was developed as a collective name for the disciplines that we've previously referred to as HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) that “help us make sense of the human world, to value and express the complexity of life and culture, and to understand and solve global issues."
The SHAPE list includes all courses on the following lists: Foundations in the Human World, Arts and Culture, Communication Intensive, Intercultural Competency, and additional courses that fit the SHAPE mission but are not part of the other included lists.
STEM
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The STEM list includes all courses on the Essential Education Math and Natural and Physical Science lists, as well as other STEM courses such as computer science, engineering, and other technology-focused courses.