Butler’s new core includes the Indianapolis Community Requirement, which requires you to take a course that meets certain requirements for active engagement in the community. You may well have already taken one. Please check your degree requirements to see where you stand. If you haven’t, you need this to graduate, so juniors (and especially seniors!!!) should look to take an ICR course. Click here for Courses offered Spring 2014 that satisfy the Indianapolis Community Requirement
At this link you will find STS courses Spring 2014, both core course and electives. You should use this list for your planning. (Course search currently lists some STS courses incorrectly; I will let you know when I’ve got that fixed.)
As you plan your schedule, here are some things to keep in mind:
Please try to make one of the STS advising meetings. We’ll have lots to talk about.
Advising officially arrives a week from today. There will be a two-week advising period beginning Oct. 21. Self Service registration begins two weeks after that, beginning Nov. 4. To help you prepare for advising it is very important that you come to one of two advising meetings we’ll be holding next week. The dates and times are as follows:
Tuesday October 22: 12:15 – 1:00
Thursday October 24, 5:15-6:00
Both will be held in Jordan Hall 238.
We will be providing Jimmy John’s — so you won’t go away hungry. Mary will be following up with a request for you to RSVP, so we can get an accurate food count.
Watch the Blog, as I’ve got quite a bit of advising information (including of course a class list) to send your way in the next week.
In advance of advising, we have assigned a number of students new advisors. Mostly we have switched students from Dr. Ryan to me, since Dr. Ryan is now keeping busy as chair of the biology department. A few of you may have been assigned to Dr. Reeves in English, Dr Edwards in anthropology, or Dr. Novak or Dr. Cline in sociology. You can check My.Butler to see who your current advisor is.
Advising starts a couple of weeks from now. We’ll be in touch with more news.
This posts introduces our new system for tracking co-curricular events. We have enrolled all STS majors and minors in a Moodle Organization called “STS_students”. You can access it from the “My Moodle menu” at the top left of your Moodle window. Inside that organization you will find something that looks a lot like a course. You will see listed “Cocurricular Activity reports”. There are 6 links, one for each required activity. After you go to an event, click on one of the links (start at the top); you will be asked for the name, date and topic of the event, as well as to write a brief summary and reflection on the topic. That summary need not be more than a paragraph or two. I will review your entries and mark them as complete. When you’ve got all 6 (or the first 3 if you are a minor) you are done.
NOTE FOR THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY HANDED IN EVENT REPORTS: We would ask that you find copies of the reports you submitted for past events, and that you cut and paste the material into the online report. I’m sorry — but we can’t do that for you. If you have handed in reports and don’t have lost your originals, you can contact Mary Proffitt to track them down.
Please let Mary or me know if you are having difficulties, and please get any events from this or previous years onto Moodle before advising starts in a couple of weeks. Especially if you are a senior, please get everything in.
If you are looking for an event, National Geographic Explorer Sylvia Earle is here next week.
One of the distinctive features of the STS major and minor is its co-curricular event requirement. The co-curricular event requirement is very much like the Butler Cultural Requirement (BCR) in the core curriculum, in that it is a requirement to attend an enriching event outside of your normal course work. In fact most events that count for the BCR also count for the STS requirement. To satisfy the requirement STS majors must attend and report upon 6 events; minors must do 3 events.
The most typical way STS students fulfill this requirement is by attending our amazing Woods Lecture Series. We will also post other events we see that could fulfill the requirement. If you see something you’d like to go to and you think would count, please just send us an e-mail so we can confirm and share the event.
If you are a senior, please note that this is a very real requirement, and you should take steps to make sure you complete it.
While the co-curricular event is a fun requirement, it has been confusing for students, faculty and advisors to keep track of. To make things easier for all of us, we’re going to roll out a new Moodle-based tracking system that will allow you to report events and see your progress on the requirement. Look for another post later this week!