The SAGES General Education Requirements include a SAGES departmental seminar, the fourth course in the sequence of SAGES courses, normally taken after students have completed their First Seminar and two University Seminars. SAGES departmental seminars are limited in enrollment, and are seminar-based and writing-intensive. Departmental seminars are located in a department, can count towards a major, and emphasize common forms of writing and other communication within that department’s discipline. The Department of Political Science regularly offers SAGES departmental seminars.
Students are not required to take a SAGES departmental seminar in their major. However, many prefer to do so, because such seminars fulfill not only a SAGES requirement but also count toward the 300-level course requirements for the POSC major. Our department therefore regularly offers SAGES departmental seminars each semester. Our goal is to ensure students have a choice of topics as they complete their SAGES requirements. Because many of our regular courses are seminars, we expect students to view departmental seminars as regular POSC courses, and many of the students will take them out of interest, not to meet a requirement. It is not unusual for POSC majors to take two or three of our SAGES departmental seminars.