Undergraduate and graduate students will tackle international issues next semester in the new University Seminar program, which aims to unite students with teachers from different schools.
Provost Jamshed Bharucha is preparing to unveil the program's two inaugural, interdisciplinary seminars. One will deal with global health and the other with water and diplomacy.
The students in the seminars will come from diverse academic backgrounds and contribute differing perspectives to the issues they discuss.
"This gives students an opportunity to bring their disciplinary knowledge from their major [and] from their professional school," Bharucha said.
Associate Provost Mary Lee echoed Bharucha's sentiments. "Both classes are looking for a diverse group of students interested in related fields," she said.
Applications for the two seminars, which were selected from a pool of possible courses, will become available Feb. 28.
Lee said the university would expand on these seminars, hoping to offer between six and eight each semester in future years.
The goal is to repeat next semester's seminars sometime within the next two years, building on the work done by the first group.
"The expectation is that the students will come together and create work dialogues that continue ... even after the seminar," Lee said.
"We expect that, given the quality of the seminars ... many of these will become real courses ... adopted by various programs into becoming a regular offering," she said.
Along with other faculty members, Assistant Professor Gretchen Kaufman at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine will teach the seminar on global health, while Shafiqul Islam, the associate dean of engineering for research at the School of Engineering, will instruct the seminar on water diplomacy.
"We are looking for students ... going into a health-related field or another field with a potential involvement with health issues," Kaufman said about her class.
While Kaufman and her team are still working out the exact curriculum for the seminar, the general thrust will be focusing a group of students with diverse backgrounds on a common health problem.
"These students will be examining the health problem from their particular discipline and communicating that to the rest of the group ... so the whole group will be comfortable with each other's areas of expertise," she said.
Once the students have found common ground, they will approach three different issues, Kaufman said.
The tentative issues the students will explore are influenza in Indonesia, the relationship between agriculture and health in New England and the decline of biodiversity.
Kaufman has not decided on which region students will focus their study of biodiversity. The fragile ecosystems of Hawaii are one possibility, she said.
Islam, like Kaufman, will be joined by a team of faculty as he leads his seminar on water diplomacy.
The seminar will tackle two issues: the shortage of water as the world population increases and the conflicts arising from water crossing national boundaries.
"We are looking for students who are thinking about this problem," Islam said. "This will be a very different type of seminar ... 50 percent of students coming from science and engineering, 50 percent coming from science and diplomacy."
He said he also plans to spend the first part of the semester getting students from different disciplinary backgrounds onto the same page.
"If we can define the problem jointly, then the solution is easier," Islam said.
The Office of the Provost is still deciding on prerequisites for these seminars, according to Caroline Campbell, the program development director in the Office of the Provost.
The application will most likely involve a short essay of no more than a few paragraphs, according to Lee.
"We just want to get a good sense of where the students are coming from ... what their interests are, and what they are hoping to get out of the seminar," Lee said.
The hope is to keep the seminars as balanced as possible between the number of graduate and undergraduate students, but the final decision will be based on the response to the application.
"We don't want it to be lopsided in any way," Kaufman said. "The make-up of the student groups is very important to us - it won't just automatically swing one way or another."
While both graduate students and undergraduate students will have to turn in an application, graduates will not be required to include the faculty sponsorship that undergraduates need.
"The application process for the undergraduates is an extra step ... a process whereby the students will write a couple paragraphs and then have an approval from a faculty sponsor," Campbell said.
While there will be a limited number of spots in the seminars and prerequisite requirements, it is unlikely that freshman and sophomore undergraduates will be eligible to apply for the seminars, Lee said.
More information on application details will be available next week on the provost's Web site and TuftsLife.com, as well as through flyers and e-mails.
