Humanities & Social Science Requirements

The interpretation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HU/SS) guidelines can be complicated! Please see your Advisor or contact the Undergraduate Advising Office to verify that your course selections will fulfill the requirements! (Yes, this has held up graduations!)

The following information is taken from the College of Engineering Bulletin ...

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Humanities and Social Sciences

The Humanities and Social Sciences Requirements offer a variety of academic choices for all students working toward an undergraduate Engineering degree. It is designed to provide the students with social, cultural, political and economic background crucial to fulfilling the College of Engineering's purpose of "preparing our graduates to begin a lifetime of technical and professional creativity and leadership in their chosen field".

To provide a breadth of education, each program in the College identifies a certain number of credit hours of elective courses (a minimum of 16) concerned with cultures and relationships--generally identified as humanities and social sciences. Students are encouraged to select a cluster theme for their humanities/social science electives. This is a unifying theme (such as psychology, economics, or history) that focuses the student's HU/SS electives.

Requirements:

The specific requirements for all students are listed below:

  • Humanities (6 credit hours):
    At least two courses totaling at least six credit hours.
  • Sequence of humanities or social sciences courses (six credit hours):
    A sequence of at least two courses in either the humanities or social sciences (or both) totaling six or more credit hours, must be taken from the same department or division (e.g., History), at least one of which must be an upper level (numbered 300 or above). This requirement may, of course, overlap requirement 1.
  • The remaining credit hours may be satisfied with elective courses in either humanities or social sciences.

Definitions and Exceptions:

These requirements can often be satisfied by a number of courses from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA), or in part by Advanced Placement, A levels or IB credit or by courses taken at another university.

For purposes of this College of Engineering requirement a course is defined as being a humanities or social science as follows:

  1. Any course that is designated as "HU" or "SS" by the College of Literature, Science and Arts meets this requirement as humanities or a social science, respectively.
  2. Language courses, except those designated in (3), are counted as humanities. However, advanced placement credit, A levels, IB or University of Michigan placement credit for language courses at the 100-level and below are not to be used to satisfy this requirement. These may be counted instead as General Electives.
  3. Courses that are designated as "BS", "CE", "MSA", "NS", "QR", "experiential", "directed reading or independent study", or course titles that include the terms or partial phrases "composition", "conversations:", "intro composition", "math", "outreach", "performance", "physics", "practice", "practicum", "statistics", "studio", "tutor" may not be used to satisfy this requirement.
  4. For the purposes of this requirement, courses not covered by items 1, 2 & 3 above will be defined as humanities courses if they are offered by the following departments or divisions:

    American Culture
    Architecture (non-studio)
    Art (non-studio)
    Classical Archaeology
    Classical Studies
    Comparative Literature
    Dance (non-performance)
    Film and Video Studies
    Great Books
    History of Art
    Asian, English, Germanic, Romance (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) and Slavic Languages and Literatures
    Music (non-performance)
    Music History and Musicology
    Philosophy
    Religion
    Theatre and Drama (non-performance)

Similarly, courses not covered by items 1, 2 & 3 above will be defined as social sciences if they are offered by the following departments:

Afro-American and African Studies
Cultural Anthropology
Communication Studies
Armenian, Judaic, Latin American and Caribbean, Latina/Latino, Middle Eastern and North African, Native American, Near Eastern, Russian and East European Studies
Economics
History
Linguistics
Political Science
Psychology
Sociology
Women's Studies

 

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(Updated: 09/26/08)