Editorial: Decision to eliminate Senior Experience praiseworthy

The faculty’s recent decision to make the Senior Experience an optional element of our curriculum (see “Trinity Faculty eliminate Senior Experience,� page 7) merits praise from the university’s students, who for seven years have been not-so-willing participants in a program ultimately found to “not meet its integrative goals.�

While a comprehensive assignment that integrates four years of academic study might be appropriate for a few select majors (like computer science, as Jensen points out) most majors struggle to consolidate all that they’ve learned into one single project. Further, is such a task even necessary at Trinity? The Common Curriculum naturally forces students to consider the connections among different departments and courses, while most classes within a single department draw upon each other to provide students with a greater context for material.

Rather than emphasizing coherence of a particular field of study, departments should follow the example of the department of business administration, which will begin requiring students to study abroad for a set period of time or complete an intermediate level of a language course before graduation (see “Business majors required to have global experience,� page 6). The business administration’s goal of making their students’ degrees more dynamic enhances both the quality and marketability of its students’ educations upon graduation.

Majors in the humanities often lead to careers far-removed from the worlds of Aristotle and Coptic art, but the lessons students learn from studying such material helps prepare them for the modern world that surrounds us. Emphasizing these ties—the ties that exist between what we study and the society we live in—reinforces what we have learned during our Trinity experience while making that experience appealing to potential employers. Requiring students to take a foreign language or study abroad helps prepare them for the global marketplace we now work in. Perhaps requiring internship experience or participation in faculty-led research would similarly provide students with an introduction to the practical application of their majors.

At a university that prides itself in its rich academic community, asking students to think integrally about their coursework is almost condescending—to think of the 124 hours worth of classes we take over four years as completely disparate, separate chunks of knowledge would be nearly impossible. It is more likely, rather, that we become so absorbed in our studies that we neglect to think of that knowledge as a marketable asset. It would do Trinity well to trust its students to view their studies comprehensively over four years (rather than in one semester during their final year) and to take steps to design curriculum requirements that benefit students once that final year is (finally) over.