Learn What You Love

People do their best when doing what they love. What? Love school, classes, teachers, homework, and learning?! We absolutely mean it.

At Rochester, you build your own curriculum with your own unique strengths and interests. There are no required subjects. You study only what you're passionate about, choosing a major in one of the three divisions of learning and taking thematic three-course clusters in other areas. Most Rochester students find they have room to double and even triple-major.

What's a Cluster?

A cluster is a set of related courses that fall within one of the three academic divisions. Each cluster contains a minimum of 12 credits of coursework. Many clusters were created by students. They're just one more way you can customize your college education.

Mad Scientists and Entrepreneurship

If you have a passion for combing through human DNA and wonder which gene makes people vote for a bad politician, build your curriculum with an emphasis on molecular genetics and political science.

If your soulmate is your cello, you're concerned about global warming, and you want to travel, then triple-major in music, chemistry and Italian. People choose those personal, one-of-a-kind combinations at Rochester every day. Nobody else's sense of requirements can stop you.

If you love to learn and look for the similarities between diverse topics (like entrepreneurship with religion, nanoscience with history, and energy research with classics), then pick and choose your courses from the entire range of knowledge.

"We've been asked to comment on the subject of How I Teach. I'd like to turn that question around for the freshmen and ask, How do you learn?" Read more...

Education should be about passion: yours, your classmates', and your professors'. Unfortunately, at most colleges it reflects the passions of the Curriculum Committee on General Education That Knows What's Good For You.