About

NYUAD’s Core Curriculum is designed to encourage students and faculty to think across and between disciplines, to pursue big questions from diverse perspectives, and with respect to 21st-century global challenges rather than the 19th- and 20th-century academic genealogies that structure many universities’ curricula. As Bryan Waterman, the former Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Development, wrote, “a good Core course shouldn’t just introduce a field or discipline or survey a body of established knowledge; rather, a good Core course should provide opportunities for self-understanding and transformative learning…. The questions it addresses should be timeless as well as timely.” You cannot “test out” of this curriculum because there is no way to have mastered the complex challenges facing our world today. The pandemic, the climate crisis, human displacement, nuclear proliferation, disruptive technologies… if the past few years have taught us anything it is that the future we imagine today could change dramatically as soon as tomorrow.

The Core’s emphasis on timely and timeless questions stretches us to see things from a different vantage, a new light. Our Core curriculum offers a wide range of small, multidisciplinary courses that give you maximum flexibility to discover intellectual and methodological approaches that most inspire you or appeal to your curiosity. These courses are also designed to provide more applied, real-world skill sets and competencies than you would receive through most General Education requirements elsewhere. 

NYUAD’s Core curriculum encourages us to explore—to clarify—the stakes of what it means to be human. You are invited to regard your Core courses as the very essence of your NYUAD education and as the foundation on which all your future learning can build. Select your courses judiciously, with an eye toward being intellectually stretched, nourished, and recharged. If your major prepares you for employment or a career, your Core, selected and assembled by you, should help guide you to become a global citizen, full of empathy toward diverse others, attuned to the ethics of your endeavors, ready to encounter and rise up to the many challenges that await. It should also encourage you to ask why and how you have come to be where you are. What will you do with your NYUAD education? And what do we do, all of us, with this tremendous privilege?