Learning Beyond Your Major

In addition to 22 majors in the divisions of Natural Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts, and Social Sciences, Wabash men have access to a full range of pre-professional programs, cross disciplinary areas of concentration, and off-campus study opportunities.

Students interested in business typically enroll in our Business Leaders Program and follow the Business Sequence, which is a set of courses that best prepare young men for careers in business. The Business Leaders Program also includes a range of on- and off-campus immersion experiences, including the Summer Business Immersion, as well as networking events, internships, and externships.

Wabash offers pre-professional programs and advising in law, medicine, and engineering. Pre-law students often compete in the fierce Moot Court competition, participate in the LSAT Bootcamp, and make visits to top-ranked law schools. Over 80 percent of our pre-med students are admitted to medical schools thanks in part to excellent pre-med advising, a rigorous curriculum, and opportunities for research with faculty and job shadowing with alumni physicians. For young men interested in engineering, Wabash offers dual degree programs with Purdue, Columbia, and Washington universities.

At Wabash, areas of concentration allow students to pursue their interests in disciplines outside the College’s major and minor offerings. An area of concentration — available in Gender Studies, International Studies, Multicultural American Studies, and Teacher Education — consists of a collection of courses from several departments.

All Wabash freshmen take two all-college courses. The first, Freshman Tutorial, is taught in the fall semester and introduces students to academic life at Wabash. Topics vary with individual instructors and are usually interdisciplinary and non-tradition. Recent Tutorials have covered the history of baseball in American life, the art of interactive media (video games), men and masculinity, and Homer’s Iliad, to name a few. In the spring semester, all freshmen take Enduring Questions, a colloquium devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives. Both courses teach students to read critically, write clearly, and communicate effectively.

The Wabash Summer Study in Ecuador program is an annual, month-long immersion for up to 15 students from a wide range of academic majors. All students become conversational in Spanish and spend the first part of the program living in Quito with host families. Each year, different faculty lead students in a wide range of research opportunities within Ecuador — ecology students have worked in and around the Galapagos Islands; teacher education students have taught in rural villages; chemistry students did research around active volcanoes; and political science and economics students have studied the impact of the oil pipeline on the economy and environment. 

For more than a decade, Wabash has offered students opportunities to take Immersion Learning Courses. Each year, over 100 students and professors travel across the country and around the world to do intense research and study in locations critical to their classroom work. Classics students study in Rome and Athens; German students spend a week in Berlin; English literature students study Hardy, Dickens, and Joyce in the cities and towns where they wrote; theater students spend a week in London’s theater district or in New York City.