Humanities & Liberal Arts Track

Tailored for high-achieving high school students, who desire to improve their voice, impact, and action this course immerses participants in professional Spanish, providing them with the tools to communicate effectively on pressing issues and advocate for real-world solutions with clarity and confidence.

Are you interested in learning how you can make a positive impact on the world through your future career? This course is focused on developing communication skills pertaining to important topics impacting all professions. Topics include gender, race, culture, diversity, and inclusivity. Interpersonal communication on complex topics, dealing with conflict, and the development, maintenance and termination of personal and professional relationships will be discussed. Through writing assignments, class discussions and a final group presentation, students will explore and engage with concepts that encourage critical thinking about identities and a vision for a more compassionate, equitable, and less harmful world.

This course can support all future careers. We live in a world where knowledge of the complexities of social identities is vital to success. Even more important, is the ability to communicate comfortably about these complexities. Students will explore their own social emotional intelligence and how tapping into this can help them in any future career from construction management, to engineering, to psychology, to business, to ethnic studies to a future as a nurse or educator.

Communication is one of the most popular majors in the US, learn more here.
Learn how a minor in Women's Gender & Queer Studies can support your career path here.."

Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary field that combines insights from historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars, to examine the lives and experiences of historically marginalized groups. A degree in Ethnic studies can lead to a range of careers including law, education, public policy, human resource, training and development, student services, humanitarian services, domestic/international advocacy and more.

This course will introduce students to ethnic studies through the land that hosts and surrounds Cal Poly. They will focus on Indigenous relationships, perspectives and land management practices in the United States, with California as the primary scope. They will also consider the concept of natural and working lands, the relationship between the federal government and Tribes and contemporary environmental justice issues, with a major focus on cultural fire. Students will hone skills in public speaking, negotiations and critical analysis.

Are you looking for an exciting career in travel or translation? Or perhaps you desire to boost your skills and you salary as a bilingual professional. Spanish language skills are in high demand in the United States, with over 43 million families who speak Spanish at home. If you want to improve your Spanish, along with your resume and opportunities, Spanish Language Studies 101 is the course for you.

Are you passionate about making a difference for students with diverse abilities? This course will equip students with the knowledge and skills to create inclusive learning environments and emphasize the importance of special education in providing quality education for all. Students will engage in hands-on activities and learn effective teaching strategies and advocacy techniques. Students will be inspired to pursue a rewarding career in special education, advocating for student rights and making a meaningful impact in the lives of individuals with diverse abilities.

Utilizing the elements and principles of stage design, it covers the development of concepts for visual narrative through critical script and text analysis, research, and discussions of professional best practices. Practical projects explore the relationships between environment, object, and text, and enact examples of visual metaphor/storytelling via varied mediums (specifically scenery, light/projection, and costumes).

Are you the next Indiana Jones? Majoring in history teaches students to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve complex problems, while also deepening their understanding of other peoples and cultures. Sample what Cal Poly's History department has to offer in this World History seminar on the Transatlantic Slave Trade through primary sources.

More than 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken across the Atlantic aboard more than 36,000 slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Approximately 1,500 of these ships – containing more than 200,000 African captives – were captured by the British Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. The documents seized aboard these ships and the interrogations of members of their crews produced in trials at Vice Admiralty courts around the British Empire reveal important details about how the slave trade operated.

In this seminar, students will work with archival manuscript sources from the nineteenth century to explore the organization and operation of the slave trade and the efforts of abolitionists and enslaved Africans to resist it.