As a Spanish major, you’ll have the opportunity to explore in-depth the languages, literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. You’ll be invited to engage with topics as various as medieval sin and modern film, novels from early modern Spain (most famously, Don Quixote) and from modern Latin America. You’ll also be encouraged to study abroad and to reflect critically upon the diversity that characterizes the Hispanic tradition.

Sociology is an ideal major for students who want to understand the social world, processes of social change, and how social context affects individual behaviors and decisions. Sociology majors learn the quantitative and qualitative tools of social scientific analysis, and how to apply them toward a systematic, evidence-based knowledge of the social world.

The major in Science & Technology Studies aims to further students' understanding of the social and cultural meanings of science and technology. Ideal for students pursuing careers in law, public policy or management, as well as for scientists, engineers and others interested in science, technology and society. The ethical issues surrounding new medical technology (such as stem cells).

The Psychology major is open to students in the College of Arts and Sciences. Students pursuing a Psychology major gain an understanding of Psychological Science broadly, and the range of processes that enable people, animals, as well as machines and forms of artificial intelligence, to make sense of, navigate, and respond to their social and physical environments. Majors learn theoretical and empirical foundations from biological (e.g., neural, endocrine, genetic), cognitive (e.g., learning, memory, perception), developmental (e.g., social and language development, aging), and social perspectives (e.g., judgments, attributions, relationships), as well as methodological and statistical approaches.

The mathematics major adapts to a number of purposes. It can emphasize the theoretical or the applied. It can be appropriate for professionals and nonprofessionals alike, and can be broad or narrow. It can also be combined easily with serious study in another subject in the physical, biological, or social sciences by means of a double major and/or concentration.

Italian is the language of everything from one of the most vivid imaginings of the afterlife (Dante’s Divine Comedy) to one of the most vibrant immigrant communities in modern North America. It’s also the language of espresso and Chianti, prosciutto and ricotta. Whether you’re interested in exploring the culture responsible for this formidable culinary legacy in the world, or whether you’re curious to learn more about the rich poetic tradition that Italian’s unique musicality has made possible; whether you’re drawn to Italy’s films, its operas, its landscapes, its cities, or its saints—our Italian program has something to whet your appetite.

The popularity of history among Cornell students is due to its usefulness as preparation for graduate, professional, or law school and for any career that requires critical thinking and good writing; the reputation of the faculty for scholarship, teaching, and advising; and most of all, the intrinsic interest of the discipline. A wide variety of introductory and advanced courses is offered. The department is particularly strong in ancient, medieval, and modern European history; in American, African, Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian history; and in the history of science.

You may want to study French for a variety of reasons: perhaps you’re curious about twenty-first-century Paris, one of the most diverse cities in the world; perhaps you want to know more about French philosophy, or literature, or film; perhaps you’re interested in the Francophone world, which spans from Africa to the Caribbean to Québec. Is it the French past that inspires you—for example, the knights and ladies and monks and nuns of the Middle Ages—or is it the French present? Are you interested in speaking and writing French more fluently, or are you particularly interested in thinking with the objects that French and Francophone cultures have produced? Our course offerings are designed to have something for virtually everyone: from courtly love to religious violence, from film to theology to lyric poetry, you’ll have a chance to encounter objects that make your world at once more familiar and more strange, objects that pique your curiosity and give you a chance to try out new languages, very much including but not by any means limited to French.

As an earth and atmospheric sciences major, you’ll pursue an interdisciplinary, unique course of study that incorporates the fundamentals of earth science with the emergence of a new and more complete approach, encompassing all components of the earth system — air, life, rock and water — to gain a new and more comprehensive understanding of the world as we know it. You can choose to focus on a disciplinary specialty such as geophysics or tectonics, or develop the broad expertise needed to understand the interactions between the diverse elements of earth and life in the past, present and future.

As a comparative literature major, you’ll gain a critical and historical perspective on world literature and cultures, with the choice of two tracks. If you want to emphasize literature in your course work, take the comparative literary studies track; if you’re interested in studying literature and theory by integrating rigorous work in film, video or other arts and media, take the literary, visual and media studies track. The major’s broad range of courses provides a critical and historical perspective on world literature and cultures.

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field that studies the fundamental workings of cognition and the mind. It investigates perception, action, language, knowledge, development, and thinking from multiple perspectives—theoretical, experimental, and computational—with the aim of gaining a better understanding of human cognition and the nature of intelligent systems. The nature of mental representations and their acquisition and use are important themes, as are the comparison between human and artificial intelligence, and the relation between human cognition and its biological foundations.

The Biology & Society Major is designed for students who wish to combine training in biology with perspectives from the social sciences and humanities on the social, political and ethical aspects of modern biology. Many of the most critical social concerns of our time -- food and population; impact of genetic engineering and new medical technologies; testing for drugs; AIDS and genes; the influence of heredity versus environment on human behavior; environmental quality; and ethical, legal and social aspects of modern medical practice -- are innately biological. At the same time, each of these issues is inherently a social concern and involves complex relations between biological and sociocultural forces. The Biology & Society major is intended to provide the skills and perspectives to enable its students to systematically confront these and many other social-biological issues. For a detailed description of the Major, see the section on Biology & Society in the Courses of Study.

The biological revolution of this century has given rise to a growing demand for engineers who can tackle local, national, and global challenges by combining the power of engineering principles with the ever-evolving science of biology. If you have a strong aptitude for math and the sciences and an interest in solving engineering problems that relate to living systems, Biological Engineering (BE) at Cornell is definitely worth investigating.

As a statistical science major, you’ll take an interdisciplinary academic approach to the study of empirical quantitative reasoning in its scientific and social context, through three themes: mathematical, computational and applied statistics. You’ll learn how statistical inference and probabilistic modeling are central to all of the pure and applied sciences today, as well as how pervasive statistical thinking and quantitative reasoning have become in culture, economy, law, government and science, dramatically changing the way people view the world.

If you have an interest in solving engineering problems related to human health, consider the burgeoning field of biomedical engineering (BME). An integrated, interdisciplinary endeavor, BME bridges the engineering and medical fields to meet the 21st-century needs of biomedical industries focused on medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Biomedical engineers discover and apply engineering principles and methods to wide array of problems in medicine, including diagnosing the biological origins of disease and designing biocompatible and living materials, prostheses, surgical implants, artificial organs, controlled drug-delivery systems, and regenerative technologies to control/augment the healing process.