Navigate the Course Catalog

Navigate the Course Catalog

The course catalog for the coming year is available online in several places.

• Course Browser, where you can search through all fall course listings, and find schedule information as well as course descriptions.
• The full year's catalog is posted here.
• Each department's website includes a link to that department's course offerings.
• A pdf version of the full catalog will be available late in the summer. We do not print a paper version of the catalog. 

Over the summer, it’s a good idea to spend some time looking through the online versions to get a sense of the curriculum as a whole and to start thinking about what opportunities are most exciting to you. It’s a little overwhelming to browse online through about 1000 course listings, so here is a guide to cracking open the online Course Browser.

50+ academic programs

The Online Catalog and the  Course Browser each allow you to search in several ways, and one of the most important is by academic program. There are about fifty of these, so it’s worth taking the time to use the Online Catalog to look over the major headings before dipping into the details of specific courses. The programs are organized alphabetically, and while some are familiar names—Spanish and Mathematics; others may be quite new to you—Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences or Neuroscience.

One of your goals in college is to explore the breadth of the liberal arts, and investigating these fields that are new to you is one way to do that. Spend some time familiarizing yourself with what these programs say about themselves. When you click on a program, you will see general information about what the field is about, what the goals of the major are, and what the main elements of study in that field include.  Many academic programs also offer a short description of what study in that field involves, just for first year students on their websites, and it is worth looking there too. 

What are the “liberal arts” anyway?

There are many definitions of this term, but one way to think about it is a collection of the fields of study that, over centuries, people have found useful for understanding the world and the place of humans in it. We often talk about three main subgroupings of fields of study within the liberal arts: Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, and
 Natural and Physical Sciences and Mathematics are the three main areas that organize Wellesley’s distribution requirements.

What is interdisciplinary work?

Interdisciplinary work is an increasingly important part of academic life. This is work in fields that bridge two or more of the more traditional disciplines, for example, Environmental Studies or Russian Area Studies. These fields deserve your attention, since they hold many opportunities for exciting study. Many students find themselves coming to Wellesley with many different interests, and find it hard to narrow those interests down. Working in an interdisciplinary field can be a great way to bring your interests together.

How to read a course description

The bulk of the information in the Course Browser is the detail about specific courses, so this tool is increasing important to you as you come closer to registration. The Browser automatically shows some basic course information, and if you click on any course, greater detail will appear. Below is a typical example of the information you can find about each course, followed by some comments on what you should be looking for as you scan the Browser this summer, and start to think about courses that you might want to take this fall (this particular course is not offered this fall, but it is a good example of the information you can learn about a course from the Browser):

The description starts with an abbreviation of the program and the course number, followed by a descriptive title and then more detailed elements:

• Program abbreviations are sometimes a little cryptic (this one is for Comparative Literature), but you will know where you are since you always arrive at a specific course by clicking first on the academic program.
   
• Course numbers are always in the 100s, 200s, or 300s, which designate introductory, intermediate, or advanced courses, very generally. First year students often find 100 level courses that are excellent introductions to their fields of study, but many 200 level courses are perfectly appropriate for students with no prior knowledge of the field. The 200-level number may just mean the course has a more specific focus than a broad, introductory survey course. Having a mix of 100 and 200 level courses is often a good strategy for first-year students, since it gives them some breadth and some depth.
   
• A course title provides a good shorthand statement of what a course is about. It can also be a clue to how a course can bring different fields together. In this case, the reference to the Enlightenment suggests that the course will have some historical component about a given time period, while the word "Readings" makes it clear that at its core, the course will engage with literature. This is also clearly one of those interdisciplinary courses that can work so well for students with many complementary interests.

​The main title, "Master of Suspicion," is an intriguing hint that the course will likely focus on ways in which writers have asked important questions about human life, and if you have studied the period of the Enlightenment in your secondary school courses, you may know that that was a major theme of that period of history. Finally, the title also identifies the course as part of our First-Year Seminar program.
 

• The course instructor and her or his department and program affiliations are noted next.
   
• Course descriptions, usually two or three sentences, provide more detailed information about the course. Look here for a sense of major topics covered or important questions the course will address, and for a sense of what the work will be like. In this case, you see a list of philosophical ideas that will be discussed in the course, and you might see one you already know something about, or something unfamiliar that you might like to get to know about. The description also indicates that students will consider materials from several different areas in Europe as well as the United States, and so should be appealing to students interested in different cultures.
   
• Prerequisites are listed, if there are any specific courses you need to have taken before you are eligible to take this course, or if there is another requirement you must have met before this course is appropriate for you. This particular course is one designed for first-year students, and enrollment is limited to first-years only. It has no prerequisites, but other courses may require you to first have taken a 100-level course in the particular area, as a foundation for an upper-level course.

  Some science and economics courses require you to have fulfilled the basic skills component of the Quantitative Reasoning requirement before you can take them (you’ll take the QR basic skills assessment during Orientation). All 300-level courses have prerequisites, so these courses are usually not available to first-year students.
   

• Distribution refers to the specific area of Wellesley’s distribution requirements that a given course is connected with. Most Wellesley courses can be used to satisfy one of these distribution requirements. We want you to experiment with courses that will be new and exciting to you; sometimes students hesitate to do this, thinking the course won’t “count” towards a major or contribute directly to a career goal. There are many ways that courses can “count,” and at the very least, you are likely to be making progress in satisfying your general distribution requirements, even if you are exploring the curriculum very broadly in your first year.
   
• Semester refers to when the course is offered. Fall and spring refer to the coming fall and spring. If a course is not offered this year, but will be available in the future, that’s noted. Some courses are listed as being offered in Wintersession or in summer, and these can be good alternatives to the regular semesters for some students. Wintersession offerings are very limited, however, so it’s hard to count on these courses in particular as available to first-year students.
   
• Unit refers to the amount of credit given for a course. Most Wellesley courses are worth 1 unit, although science courses with a lab component are usually worth 1.25 units, in recognition of the additional time these courses have scheduled.

Wintersession courses are often .5 units, and some other courses may also earn less than a full unit (some music courses in particular fall into this group). The Wellesley degree requires a total of 32 units, so the course load is usually 4 units per semester (4.25 if you are taking a lab course). First-year students in their first semester may take no more than 4 courses, which might total more than 4 units, if a student is taking a lab.