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WESTX 101 Westminster Experience (1 credit hour)
This course introduces students to university resources, policies, and procedures
and helps them cultivate academic literacy and skills for academic success. Students
also explore major and career options. First Scholars take FIRST 100 in place of WESTX
101.
Completion Policy:
Undergraduate Students must take WESTX 101 within their first two semesters of full-time
enrollment at Westminster, preferably in their first semester. Transfer students with
more than 12 college credits earned after completion of high school are not required
to take WESTX 101, but all transfer students are highly encouraged to do so.
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WESTX 201 Career Exploration (1 credit hour)
This course introduces students to career exploration and decision making. Students
will build strong self-awareness and confidence in their career options through assessments,
informational interviews, and other career exploration tools. The activities, content,
experiences, and resources in this course provide students with the basics for the
important process of making career and life decisions. ENVI 201 Green Careers, FIRST
200 Community-Based Learning, MCNR 200 McNair Scholars Seminar, and PSYC 255 Career
Exploration count toward the WESTX 201 requirement.
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WESTX 301 Career Readiness (1 credit hour)
Career Readiness helps students learn the skills necessary for building their careers.
Students will learn how to write and structure documents like resumes, cover letters,
and personal statements. They will be introduced to LinkedIn and professional networking,
and career search strategies. They will also practice interview and presentation skills.
This instruction can be provided in courses that meet major requirements, including
internships and Senior Capstones.
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Creativity and Performance (3-4 credits)
In these courses, students experience the way creativity is practiced in particular
disciplines, and use innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking to solve problems.
These courses help students find and develop a unique voice within a discipline.
While creativity is a part of many courses and all disciplines, Creativity and Performance
courses spend much of the semester on learning activities specifically designed to
develop and expand students’ creative thinking and skills. These courses include creative
projects and opportunities for performance as appropriate to the discipline.
Creativity and Performance Courses
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Critical Explorations (3-4 credits)
These writing-intensive courses cultivate critical thinking and communication skills
as students investigate texts, other media, ideas, and historical periods. Critical
Explorations courses require students to construct academic arguments, use scholarly
sources, and gain crucial information literacy skills as they learn to draft, reflect
on, and revise their writing. These courses include approximately 20 pages of writing,
distributed across 3-4 major assignments appropriate to the course being offered.
Additionally, Critical Explorations courses include culminating projects that require
students to conduct research using secondary sources. To help students develop information
literacy skills for these projects, librarians from the Giovale Library provide instruction,
assignments for which count toward five percent of the final grade.
Critical Explorations Courses
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Culture and Diversity (3-4 credits)
WCore courses in Culture and Diversity engage students with diverse cultural traditions
and challenge their assumptions about the world around them. Consideration of multiple
perspectives and traditions provokes both an appreciation of one’s own heritage and
an awareness that other cultures should be encountered and evaluated on their own
terms. These courses involve analyzing problems in relevant historical and cultural
contexts, helping students become more responsible citizens.
Culture and Diversity Courses
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Mathematics and Reasoning (3-4 credits)
In these courses, students engage with mathematical and logical reasoning as foundational
tools for problem-solving and critical analysis. These courses help students develop
a disciplined approach to evaluating data and ideas, constructing arguments, and identifying
patterns across diverse contexts. While reasoning and quantitative methods are integral
to many disciplines, Mathematics and Reasoning courses dedicate significant class
time to activities designed to strengthen analytical thinking, numerical fluency,
and/or computational skills. Students will apply these concepts to real-world scenarios,
fostering a deeper understanding of how logical reasoning and quantitative analysis
inform decision-making and innovation.
Mathematics and Reasoning Courses
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Physical and Natural World (3-4 credits)
Physical and Natural World courses are designed to investigate how specific disciplines
explain phenomena or address gaps in our current understanding of how our world works.
Scientific inquiry includes evaluating the integrity and validity of existing sources
of information, exploring different methodological approaches to addressing a question,
and discussing the processes used to analyze and synthesize findings in order to show
how new knowledge is generated, reported, and incorporated into our daily lives. These
courses investigate contemporary issues important to science and society using discipline-specific
information, relevant scholarly literature, and standards of practice from the field.
Physical and Natural World Courses
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Power, Institutions, and Behavior (3-4 credits)
In these courses, students explore how people think, act, and interact as individuals
and as part of groups or institutions. By examining topics like human behavior, power
dynamics, and societal structures, students gain insights into how the world works
and how they can better understand their own role in it. These courses emphasize real-world
applications, helping students connect the study of behavior and institutions to their
lives and future goals. They also introduce key concepts, processes, techniques, and
ethical considerations involved in college-level academic research through the collection
and analysis of qualitative, quantitative, and textual data, such as experimental
results, survey responses, field observations, and media artifacts.
Power, Institutions, and Behavior Courses
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Engaging the World prepares students to be better global citizens through travel experiences,
on-campus courses, or international internships. It builds on the knowledge from the
WCore courses students take during their first and second years and applies what they
have learned by focusing on ways to advance social transformation, equity, and parity
within our local and global communities. This experience challenges their biases and
prejudices and emphasizes the knowledge that we live in an integrated, complex and
interdependent society. Engaging the World courses can meet only the Engaging the
World requirement for the WCore (that is, they cannot also meet lower-division WCore
categories). Regardless of their course number, they cannot also meet other WCore
requirements since they meet separate learning outcomes.
There are four options for completing the Engaging the World requirement:
- WCore Engaging the World Courses
- Study Abroad
- The study abroad program must be on the approved list of programs at the time of application
and participation. The official list of approved programs is maintained by the Office
for Global Engagement.
- The student must take at least one course for a minimum of 3 credits or 45 clock hours.
- The course must be at a level equivalent to a Westminster University undergraduate
course, either lower or upper division.
- The course must be transferable to Westminster University and an official transcript
must be submitted to the Registrar’s Office upon completion of the study abroad program.
- The student must earn at least a C- (or U.S. equivalent) final grade on at least one
course that is at least 3 U.S. credits.
- International Internship
- The student must take at least one internship course for a minimum of 126 contact
hours and at least 3 credit hours.
- The student must earn at least a C- (or U.S. equivalent) final grade in the course.
- The internship must be completed in a country that is outside of the student's permanent
residence.
- U.S. citizens must choose a site that is located outside of the United States
- International students (non-immigrant visa holders) can count an internship completed
in the United States or another country, as long as the internship site is not in
their country of permanent residency.
- May Term Study Experience
The following types of programs do not fulfill the Engaging the World requirement
(this is an example of ineligible programs and not a complete list):
- Non-credit bearing international travel including volunteer or service programs
- Non-credit bearing research conducted abroad
- Non-credit bearing language training programs
- Non-credit bearing work abroad programs or experiences
- Military service
- Religious missions
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