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Sample Concentrations
- Law, Politics and Critical Race Relations
- Poetry and Linguistics
- Music Business and Community Arts
- Mathematical Neuroscience
- Entrepreneurship and Social Justice
- Marketing and Media
- Public Health and Environmental Studies
What is Individualized Study?
The cornerstone of the Gallatin School is its individualized approach to education: you enjoy an unusual degree of freedom to design your own individualized programs of study, with relatively few requirements and a wide range of opportunities. You pursue your academic and artistic interests by taking courses in the various schools of New York University, engaging in self-directed education through independent studies and tutorials, studying away through a Gallatin travel course or at one of NYU’s global sites, and participating in experiential learning through internships at New York City’s countless institutions, businesses and arts organizations.
Creating your own program requires maturity, self-motivation, and independence. Gallatin’s unique synthesis of high academic standards and flexible study opportunities provides an outstanding educational experience. The Gallatin School was created to respond to the needs and interests of a special kind of student—focused, intelligent, disciplined, and creative. For more than 40 years, the Gallatin philosophy has continued to attract a wide variety of bright, talented students. Your classmates at Gallatin will be diverse and multitalented, making the classroom an intellectually stimulating environment.
Advising
Strong academic advising is a key component of a Gallatin education. With access to a large, urban university such as NYU, the faculty adviser becomes your intellectual mentor and helps you to identify and take advantage of courses and opportunities at Gallatin and throughout the NYU. You are teamed with an NYU faculty member who in most cases has some expertise in your area of concentration. Your faculty adviser will help you to plan your schedule and ensure that your program has depth, breadth, and coherence as well as the elements that will help you to reach your educational and professional goals.
Undergraduate students have the additional support of a class adviser who works with the members of a specific cohort (e.g., first-year students). In addition to being a resource for each individual student, class advisers become acquainted with a class as a whole. Graduate students have the additional support of the administrative director and the faculty co-directors of the program, who serve as general program advisers and are available to clarify the aims and policies of the M.A. program.
The Concentration
Gallatin students work closely with a faculty adviser to develop a unique concentration based on their own academic and professional goals. A concentration is a program of study organized around a theme, problem, activity, period of history, area of the world or some central idea; it takes the place of a major. To construct a concentration, students draw on a variety of perspectives and theories and build on a range of skills in order to explore the organizing theme or underlying concept. They may take related courses in a number of departments in other schools, as well as in Gallatin; they may engage in independent study or internships as part of the work. The concentration typically constitutes from one-fourth to one-third of students’ undergraduate studies. It may lead toward graduate study or toward a career, or it may express a student’s curiosity or passion about a particular problem or set of ideas.
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Did You Know?
As a Gallatin student, you design your own unique course of study exploring multiple disciplines or various perspectives on a specific area of study not available in traditional departments.
Faculty Profile
Millery Polyné
Millery Polyné's teaching and research interests examine the history of U.S. African American and Afro-Caribbean intellectual thought; coloniality in the …
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