Carthage Symposium

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Carthage Symposium?

The Carthage Symposium is an innovative academic program in interdisciplinary education designed to equip undergraduates with the tools to succeed in the 21st century.

How does the Carthage Symposium accomplish this goal?

By studying with a dedicated two-person faculty team, either in a single "team-taught" course or in a two-course "clustered pair," upper-class students explore a topic through the lenses of two completely different fields. For example, an art major might:

examine her discipline from the perspective of a psychologist,
take a hard-headed look at the business technologies necessary for succeeding in her career,
decide to venture beyond her own culture and study abroad to explore the interaction of Maori and Pakeha societies in New Zealand,
or even investigate the impact of political practices on society and environment in Peru.

In a Carthage Symposium, the faculty team works to complement the Carthage liberal arts core curriculum not only by building skills in written and oral communication, but also by modeling academic discourse. Each faculty member comes from a different discipline, approaches problems with a different skill set, and learns the specialized language of the other. Faculty members engage and challenge students to ask questions such as:

How do I work effectively with a team?
How do I communicate with colleagues from other cultures?
How do I approach diverse audiences?
How do I see issues from multiple perspectives?

In both team-taught and clustered pair formats, the Carthage Symposium presents diverse ways of learning about and understanding the world, models effective navigation of boundaries, and opens up avenues to innovative problem-solving.

Academics at Carthage

Prospective Students

Focusing on Nature

Student Work. See photographs taken by Carthage students during a J-Term trip to Tucson, Ariz.