Academics

For more than a century, Puget Sound has offered some of the most forward-looking academic programs in the country, providing a solid intellectual foundation.

Puget Sound’s academic program combines study in the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences with opportunities for discovery at the intersections of knowledge. At the program’s heart is a challenging four-year core curriculum — a vast set of course offerings from which each student selects eight.

As you navigate the core, you work with an advisor to chart a path through Puget Sound’s 1,200 annual course offerings. By your second year, you declare a major. Options include interdisciplinary programs in fields such as Asian studies, international political economy, and neuroscience. Puget Sound is also the only liberal arts college in the Northwest to offer a liberal arts-focused degree in business through our School of Business and Leadership and a music program of conservatory caliber.

Whether in the classroom or laboratory, on stage, or in the gallery, through academic internships or projects in the greater community, you will find avenues for communicating your ideas and testing your theories. Whatever major you choose, you might also pursue independent research, study abroad experience, and a senior thesis or capstone project. Each is a chance to broaden your perspective and deepen your understanding of yourself and the world around you.

Learn more about:

Featured Department

Classics

The Classics Department strongly encourages students to take advantage of opportunities to study in the culture of the ancient Mediterranean on site. Standing on the rostrum in the Roman Forum where Cicero delivered his speeches or helping to excavate a Greek house provides a perspective on the past unavailable in a classroom setting. Popular study abroad programs include the intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, College Year in Athens, and Arcadia University Greece Program.   Learn more about what you can do with a major in Classics.

Featured Faculty

A. Susan Owen, Communication Studies

Professor Owen’s scholarly interests center on the rhetorical influence of American mass-mediated culture in structuring public consciousness, moral sensibilities, and social conduct. Her research concerns the manner in which the texts of popular culture sustain and/or transform social constructions of gender, race, and race relations. Professor Owen studies the implications of these constructions upon the dynamic field of our cultural memory - the meaning of our nation’s stories and our collective sense of identity as a national people. Her most recent book collaboration is Bad Girls: Cultural Politics and Media Representations of Transgressive Women. Learn more about research interests of faculty in communication studies.