Departmental Minors

“I knew I wanted to pursue a career in science, but I also love literature. I chose an English class to fulfill an NU Core requirement, and I loved it so much that I went ahead with the minor. … I know that the critical reasoning and writing skills that I built as an English minor will continue to serve me in interpreting scientific literature and communicating public health advances to a broader audience.”

“I feel very strongly that curiosity and inquisitiveness fit into a larger ‘universal grammar’ of sorts. Science, math, music, English, French, Hebrew: they’re all just different languages. If you’re good at pattern-recognition and can figure out the syntax and vocabulary of each, there’s really no reason you can’t code-switch. I suppose that’s a reason I’m so attracted to the early modern period—what I would consider ‘literary’ history and theory bleeds so easily into the history of science, botany, cartography, cosmology…the list goes on and on.”

“Studying the past through literature really allows for us to see what we’re dealing with in the world today. I think that’s where I found the most value in my minor. For me, there came a recognition in that setting that our modern world has far too many striking comparisons with the world from a few centuries ago in relation to how we treat people. ”