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Department of Sociology and Anthropology

International Studies BS - Overview

Tailor shop in Nashik, India. Photo by Andi Hefti Our major in international studies develops exciting career opportunities through cooperative education and professional work experience, study abroad and internships, foreign language skills, and course work focusing on world regions, international business or public policy.

Areas of Study
East Asia, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Indigenous Studies.

Education
Globalization has created an international demand for individuals who are linguistically talented, articulate in the social and political sciences, and sensitive to cultural diversity.

International Studies @ RIT offers a comprehensive educational program to meet these demands.

Our degree program provides the conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing global change across societies and local consequences in world regions. The program's curriculum aims to train students progressively to think in a holistic, humanistic, and systematic way about globalization and about the societal consequences of global issues such as human rights and ethnic conflict, global health, the environment, economic justice, violence and terrorism, and the predicaments of democracy and civil society.

  1. We provide students with effective communication skills in a globalizing world. Our program promotes communicative competence in a foreign language (3-year study of an East Asian, Middle Eastern/African, European or Latin American language).
  2. We enhance students' critical thinking and problem solving skills by immersion in an international experience. Our program promotes a cross-cultural grasp of peoples, societies, and politics in a global context by offering an integrated learning experience through study abroad, cooperative education or internships in foreign countries or international organizations.
  3. We provide students with a firm grounding in theory and method for analyzing global processes in societal contexts. Graduates from this program have training in data collection, analysis, and interpretation with which to understand the operation of global processes in local and applied contexts and have proficiency in the methodologies of social and cultural globalization.
  4. We promote the student's ability to understand and analyze the impact of global processes on world regions. Our program offers undergraduates a multi-disciplinary education with a focus on the salient regional, historical, economic, political, cultural, and technological problems as they affect the world in this era of globalization. Our students gain a nuanced understanding of how different societies and cultural systems function and what constraints are imposed by globalization on national policy making.
  5. Our program has a strong career focus that combines student interests and abilities with analytic real-world learning.

Our major is designed for students interested in careers requiring an understanding of the multiple ways in which international fields affect, shape, and alter our experiences of the world.
The student's educational experience is balanced between applied, case-study learning and theoretical, conceptual knowledge. These two types of learning are inseparable and are useful for work in academia, government agencies, private industry, or non-governmental and non-profit organizations.