The major in economics and mathematics is designed to meet the needs of undergraduate students who plan to pursue doctoral study in economics or business, or who wish to pursue a career as an actuary or other professional requiring a sophisticated understanding of economics and mathematics. The major combines the main undergraduate content of both economics and mathematics within a programmatic structure that joins the two disciplines. It provides a coursework combination required to prepare for an economics doctoral (Ph.D.) program, or for a group of technically demanding professional careers.

Program Learning Outcomes

Program learning outcomes for economics, economics and mathematics, business management economics, and global economics majors:

✔ Critical Thinking Skills: Students are expected to be able to apply economic analysis to everyday problems in real world situations, to understand current events and evaluate specific policy proposals, and to evaluate the role played by assumptions in arguments that reach different conclusions to a specific economic or policy problem.

✔ Quantitative Reasoning Skills: Students are expected to understand how to use empirical evidence to evaluate the validity of an economic argument, use statistical methodology, interpret statistical results, and conduct appropriate statistical analysis of data.

✔ Problem-Solving Skills: Students are expected to be able to solve problems that have clear solutions and to address problems that do not have clear answers and explain conditions under which these solutions may be correct.

✔ Specialized Knowledge and Application of Skills: Students are expected to develop critical and quantitative thinking skills specific to business and accounting.

✔ Communication Skills: Students are expected to be able to communicate effectively in written, oral, and graphical form about specific issues, and to formulate well-organized written arguments that state assumptions and hypotheses supported by evidence.

Economics studies how individuals, firms, governments, and other organizations within our society make choices, and how these choices affect the society’s use of its available resources. Economists study a wide range of questions such as: How do individuals make decisions in the face of uncertainty? What are the causes of the Great Recession of 2009? Why do Europeans work fewer hours than Americans? Why have health care and education costs risen so much? What are the consequences of government deficits? Why has the gap between rich and poor in many countries risen? Why have some poor countries grown faster than many rich countries in recent years?

Economics majors study a substantive core of theory and mathematical and statistical methods that aid in addressing these questions. This required core can be combined with electives that emphasize specialized areas such as international economics, finance, public policy, applied microeconomics, law and economics, economic development, quantitative methods, macroeconomics, game theory and behavioral economics. A focus on core theory as well as mathematical and quantitative tools provides a foundation for graduate studies in economics. Selecting a range of electives to sample the broad domain of economics offers an excellent background for students who plan to enter careers in the private sector, in public service, the non-profit sector or to attend law school or other professional schools.

Program Learning Outcomes

Program learning outcomes for economics, economics and mathematics, business management economics, and global economics majors:

✔ Critical Thinking Skills: Students are expected to be able to apply economic analysis to everyday problems in real world situations, to understand current events and evaluate specific policy proposals, and to evaluate the role played by assumptions in arguments that reach different conclusions to a specific economic or policy problem.

✔ Quantitative Reasoning Skills: Students are expected to understand how to use empirical evidence to evaluate the validity of an economic argument, use statistical methodology, interpret statistical results, and conduct appropriate statistical analysis of data.

✔ Problem-Solving Skills: Students are expected to be able to solve problems that have clear solutions and to address problems that do not have clear answers and explain conditions under which these solutions may be correct.

✔ Specialized Knowledge and Application of Skills: Students are expected to develop critical and quantitative thinking skills specific to business and accounting.

✔ Communication Skills: Students are expected to be able to communicate effectively in written, oral, and graphical form about specific issues, and to formulate well-organized written arguments that state assumptions and hypotheses supported by evidence.

The ecology and evolution major focuses on general topics that are not specific to taxonomic group or habitat. As such it provides students with interdisciplinary skills necessary for understanding and solving complex problems in ecology, evolution, behavior, and physiology. All of these disciplines address questions on larger spatial and temporal scales that can be applied to important environmental problems, including genetic and ecological aspects of conservation biology and biodiversity.

Students majoring in ecology and evolution will receive a B.S. degree based on an integrated series of courses providing breadth in fundamental areas of biology and allied sciences that enhance understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes. The capstone of this curriculum is a suite of field courses providing students unique opportunities to learn and conduct research in a host of ecological systems. Students are encouraged to take field courses in their areas of specialization. Other opportunities include participation in research projects with faculty sponsors and the intensive UC Education Abroad Programs (UCEAP) in Costa Rica (tropical biology) and Australia (marine sciences).

Program Learning Outcomes

The undergraduate curriculum offered by EEB is designed to ensure that all students declared in any EEB-sponsored major will achieve the following seven program learning outcomes:

✔ Students will demonstrate broad-based knowledge of the fundamentals of ecology, behavior, evolution and physiology and the relationships among these disciplines.

✔ Students will demonstrate skills in the observation and experimental study of organisms, using both field-based and laboratory-based approaches.

✔ Students will demonstrate skills in identifying, accessing, comprehending and synthesizing scientific information, including interpretation of the primary scientific literature. This includes understanding key questions and hypotheses, interpreting results and conclusions, and evaluating quality through critique.

✔ Students will demonstrate the ability to conceive and execute independent scientific research, including developing their own questions and hypotheses, designing an appropriate theoretical or empirical/experimental approach, executing that approach, and analyzing and interpreting data.

✔ Students will demonstrate an ability to understand and apply fundamental quantitative skills, including models and statistical analyses, so as to properly interpret published research and apply such skills in their own research.

✔ Students will demonstrate the ability to communicate scientific work, such as a scientific paper, proposal, essay, or notebook, in written, oral or poster format.

✔ Students will exhibit strong teamwork and problem solving skills. They will demonstrate the ability to make arguments from evidence and work together to find optimal solutions.

The Earth sciences/anthropology combined major is intended for students with interests in Earth sciences and the laboratory-based aspect of anthropology. These include anthropology students interested in archaeology or paleoanthropology who desire more intensive training in natural sciences and Earth sciences students interested in paleobiology or archaeology. The combined major provides a rigorous training in both anthropology and Earth sciences and will permit students to enter graduate programs in Earth sciences, archaeology, or paleoanthropology. The combined major has a significantly different set of cognate science and required lower- and upper-division courses than the standard major; therefore, students are advised to plan carefully and to contact academic advisers in the Earth and Planetary Sciences and Anthropology departments early if they have questions.

Program Learning Outcomes

Students graduating with a B.A. in Earth sciences/anthropology should be able to:

✔ Understand the processes governing the properties and evolution of Earth's interior and surface;

✔ Identify rocks and minerals, and describe their connection to geologic processes;

✔ Utilize algebraic mathematical tools to quantitatively address questions in the geosciences; and

✔ Write in a clear, organized, and logical fashion using disciplinary standards for reporting and citation.

The bachelor of science (B.S.) program is designed for students who intend to pursue professional careers in Earth and planetary sciences, engineering, policy, law, teaching, or business or who otherwise desire the broad, quantitative training available at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In addition to providing comprehensive preparation in the basic physical sciences, and particular breadth and depth in Earth and planetary sciences, the curriculum is structured to prepare students for the competitive graduate school and career marketplace.

The core of the major includes calculus, physics, chemistry, and a group of comprehensive Earth and planetary sciences courses. For the general B.S., students then select at least six additional courses from a diverse list of upper-division electives, with at least two that involve significant laboratory or field data acquisition and analysis. These electives, often in combination with additional upper-division courses from this and related departments, provide the student with expertise in one or more subdisciplines within Earth sciences.

Elective distributions can be designed to emphasize earthquake and faulting studies, Earth surface processes, Earth system sciences, geologic hazards, geology, crustal and deep-Earth geophysics, marine geophysics, and water resources. Four formal concentrations, all with specific course requirements and leading to an Earth and planetary sciences B.S., are available: geology, geophysics, ocean sciences, and planetary sciences. A senior comprehensive experience (senior thesis, geologic field camp, or intensive capstone course) is required of all majors.

Program Learning Outcomes

Students graduating with a B.S. in Earth and planetary sciences (all concentrations) should be able to:

✔ Understand the processes governing the properties and evolution of Earth's interior and surface;

✔ Identify rocks and minerals, and describe their connection to geologic processes;

✔ Utilize algebraic mathematical tools to quantitatively address questions in the geosciences; and

✔ Write in a clear, organized, and logical fashion using disciplinary standards for reporting and citation.

The B.A. program in critical race and ethnic studies (CRES) offers an interdisciplinary curriculum that enables majors to study the history of race and racialization both in the United States and across the globe and to learn how structures of race and racism have changed over time. By approaching race as a major ideological framework through which practices of power and domination as well as struggles for liberation and self-determination have been articulated and enacted throughout modern history and in the contemporary moment, our majors develop a deep understanding of how race and other modalities of power have informed the imagination and trajectory of social transformation and justice in the past and the present. The study of race in CRES yields critical insights into the social, political, cultural, and economic processes that have defined and shaped the modern era—colonialism, slavery, conquest, displacement, genocide, warfare, migration, creolization, criminalization, imprisonment, disenfranchisement, globalization, racial profiling, and post-9/11 security state policies. CRES engages with queer and feminist critique, decolonial thought, and analysis of labor in challenging asymmetrical and exploitative power relations, not only illuminating how race, racism, and racialization are socially reproduced in societies structured by dominance, but also fostering emergent and contestatory forms of knowledge and praxis. A commitment to structural transformation is grounded in intersectional approaches to difference (race, class, gender, sexuality, and caste) and defines the work we do.

The CRES major allows students flexibility at the upper-division level to design an interdisciplinary course of study that enables a general overview of areas of interest, while selecting electives from multiple areas of specific research and career interests. Alternatively, they can engage deeply with a key area of focus, taking a number of courses in a particular area in order to develop expertise in it. For example, they may wish to focus on a social group (e.g., members of the African diaspora), on a discipline (e.g., history), on a social phenomenon (e.g., social movements), or on a methodological or theoretical orientation (e.g., theories of race, gender, and sexuality).

Through immersion in a program of study that is multidisciplinary, comparative, and transnational in scope, CRES majors develop a critical perspective on race, racial relations, and racial justice in the United States and beyond. CRES also helps students develop skills in critical thinking, comparative analysis, the application of social theory, research, communication, and writing so that they can act effectively in an ever-changing, complex, and culturally diverse world. A student with a bachelor’s degree in CRES will be well prepared for employment and continuing educational opportunities in the humanities, social sciences, law, medicine/public health, education, and international affairs and strongly positioned to pursue careers in the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

Program Learning Outcomes

Students who complete the CRES major should emerge with the following skills, competencies, and knowledge:

Critical Frameworks

✔ Demonstrate deep knowledge of historical, contemporary, and intersectional perspectives on race and ethnicity.

✔ Demonstrate familiarity with different disciplinary methods applied to race and ethnicity.

✔ Demonstrate a critical perspective on institutional power and knowledge.

Communication

✔ Demonstrate ability to account for other people’s arguments, to formulate one’s own arguments, and to locate both arguments in the larger context of the field.

✔ Demonstrate ability to formulate an argument in alternative media, such as speech, audiovisual, digital, and other forms of non-written communication.

✔ Demonstrate writing effectively in the interdisciplinary field.

Research

✔ Demonstrate ability to design and implement a collaborative research project.

✔ Demonstrate ability to design and implement an independent research project.

Community Collaboration, Engagement, and Activism

✔ Demonstrate an understanding of the issues, ethics, and methods surrounding activist, collaborative, and community-based research projects.

✔ Demonstrate an understanding of collaborative knowledge that effectively integrates theoretical and experiential thinking about social justice.

Creative technologies (CT) is an online- and hybrid-modality interdisciplinary arts and design major, led by faculty in Art, Music, and PPD (Performance, Play, and Design). Its curriculum features innovative teaching and learning environments, paired with an emphasis on emerging arts and design technologies and the active roles of artists and designers in cultivating a just and ethical society. Our courses intersect faculty commitments to justice, accessibility, equity, diversity, and inclusion—along cultural, gender, racial, economic, and social dimensions—with commitments to expanding access to innovative arts education, re-contextualizing and challenging Western and other hegemonic frameworks for art and design, and amplifying marginalized and historically silenced voices.

Students in creative technologies develop fluency in the languages and tools of contemporary media, arts, and design technologies, including technologies for creativity in sound, image, and animation; games and playable media; documentary and knowledge-curation media; web-based and participatory media; and creative interactions with machine learning and AI. At the core of the Creative Technologies ethos is a conviction that technology literacy is inseparable from technology ethics. Artists and designers are primary curators of knowledge, dialogue, and cultural representation; with those roles we hold a responsibility to cultivate community agency, democracy, environmental justice including climate action, and broad access to knowledge and social dialogue. To support that crucial work, the Creative Technologies program aims to prepare students for a lifetime of relevant, meaningful, and impactful creative engagement—while instilling capacity for work and play, activism and education, self-expression, self-efficacy, and even fun.

This program is primarily delivered in lab-based online environments — where the online presence that students create and perform with each other is just as important as the lessons they learn together as they make art, engage in critical inquiry, and critique. We aim to inspire collaborative art and design that connect online and traditional communities with creative vitality, critical inquiry, improvisation, and lasting meaning. You will learn how to navigate the platforms and venues in which sound and image, story and play, character and action, can be brought effectively to a wide and inquisitive public. And you will learn effective production practices—including improvisation, dialogue, research skills, and styles of collaboration—that bring complex, impactful projects to fruition.

Program Learning Outcomes

✔ Gain literacy in creative tools for digital expression, and in the effective use of technology in arts and design: including digital platforms and algorithms, AI- and algorithmic arts and design tools, and emerging technology in a variety of media.

✔ Critically comprehend media and media culture, potentially including institutions, creative labor and labor practices; the ethics of data, information, and digital platforms; with a focus on digital media's diverse impacts on dialogues surrounding tradition, culture, and racial, social, and environmental justice.

✔ Understand contemporary creative practices in their contexts: relating them to the impactful practices of our contemporaries and predecessors; contextualized by theory, history, and ethics in the arts, design, and media.

✔ Learn strategies for bringing complex work to completion, individually and collaboratively, across a variety of media, including written, image- and sound-based, performance-based, and socially engaged media.

✔ Cultivate a mindset of curiosity, dialogue, and growth, with respect to one’s work and process, and its social and ethical impact. We learn from mistakes as well as triumphs—ours and others'—as we work toward meaningful creative work and social change.

✔ Learn to engage in informed social practices, shaped by reflection on practical activism for positive change; individual and collective identity; sustainability; equity; and justice; and by a community-focused commitment to re-contextualize and challenge Western and other hegemonic frameworks for art and design.

The goal of the B.S. in Computational Media degree is to provide students a deep understanding of the technical aspects of computer game engineering and a broad background in the artistic, systemic, and production elements of game design and development.

The core of the degree program is a strong grounding in computer science and computer engineering, preceded by a foundation in mathematics. Classes also develop skills in areas such as visual communication and team-oriented game production, while developing knowledge of topics such as game history, play experiences, game systems, and social and ethical issues.

In their upper-division courses, students gain depth by taking electives in computational media and computer science and engineering, with options such as Game AI, Game Graphics and Real-Time Rendering, Generative AI (Procedural Content Generation), Mobile Applications, Interactive Storytelling, and Algorithmic Music. A two-course game development sequence (Game Development Experience and Game Development Patterns) and a two-quarter comprehensive sequence (Rapid Prototyping and Game Design Studio) allow students to develop complex computer games and integrate materials from the rest of the program.

Program Learning Outcomes

Recipients of a B.S. degree in Computer Game Design at University of California, Santa Cruz, are expected to have the following skills and experiences:

✔ Demonstrate mastery of computer science in the following core knowledge areas: algorithms, data structures, complexity, and software engineering and development.

✔ Apply system-level perspective by thinking at multiple levels of detail and abstraction and by recognizing the context in which a computer system may function, including its interactions with people and the physical world.

✔ Apply problem-solving skills and the knowledge of computer science to solve real problems.

✔ Recognize and take into account the social, legal, historical, ethical, and cultural issues in the discipline of computer games.

✔ Demonstrate written, oral, and graphic design communication skills regarding technical material about computer science and computer games, broadly conceived.

✔ Design and build a technical system that achieves an artistic goal for audience experience, employing sound computer science techniques.

✔ Demonstrate the ability to collaboratively plan, organize, and execute complex, team-oriented projects, using appropriate communication and coordination techniques.

The bachelor of science (B.S.) program is appropriate for students desiring a strong concentration in the core areas of computer science—algorithms, programming languages, and systems—with more courses in computer science, computer engineering, and computational media; this program also allows for a few electives outside of science and engineering.

Applications of computer science are found in many other areas of study, from art, music, and linguistics to social sciences, economics, business, digital, and social media, environmental and life sciences, and sciences. Thus, interdisciplinary activities are encouraged. For those students whose primary interest is in another area, a minor in computer science is offered.

Program Learning Outcomes

Recipients of a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are expected to have the following skills and experiences:

✔ Demonstrate mastery of computer science in the following core knowledge areas:

- Algorithms, data structures, and complexity

- Programming languages

- Software engineering and development

- Computer systems

✔ Apply system-level perspective by thinking at multiple levels of detail and abstraction and by recognizing the context in which a computer system may function, including its interactions with people and the physical world.

✔ Apply problem-solving skills and the knowledge of computer science to solve real problems.

✔ Understand how technological advances impact society and the social, legal, ethical and cultural ramifications of computer technology and their usage.

✔ Write about and orally communicate technical material about computer science and computer systems, broadly conceived.

The bachelor of arts (B.A.) program at University of California, Santa Cruz, is designed to give students a grounding in both theoretical and practical topics in computer science, computer engineering, and mathematics while leaving flexibility for a broad program of study, including some courses outside of science and engineering, or even for a double major in another discipline.

Program Learning Outcomes

Recipients of a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz are expected to have the following skills and experiences:

✔ Demonstrate mastery of computer science in the following core knowledge areas:

- Algorithms, data structures, and complexity

- Programming languages

- Software engineering and development

✔ Apply system-level perspective by thinking at multiple levels of detail and abstraction and by recognizing the context in which a computer system may function, including its interactions with people and the physical world.

✔ Apply problem-solving skills and the knowledge of computer science to solve real problems.

✔ Understand how technological advances impact society and the social, legal, ethical and cultural ramifications of computer technology and their usage.

✔ Write about and orally communicate technical material about computer science and computer systems, broadly conceived.