By Mary Leong
Tailor a course specific to your academic interests. Apply now to coordinate a Student Directed Seminar, where students get the opportunity to propose, plan and facilitate a 3-credit seminar course for their peers.
To coordinate a Student Directed Seminar, students propose a course not currently available at UBC. If a professor agrees to sponsor the proposal, the student develops a course outline under their guidance. If approved by the Student Directed Seminars Advisory Committee, the course then becomes available for students to take as an upper-level 3-credit course.
Previous Student Directed Seminars have represented some of the most cutting-edge fields of discovery and research from a variety of academic disciplines. Past topics have included:
- Anthropology of the Secular
- The Politics of Health Care Reform
- Science and Civilization in Islam
- Topics in Stem Cell Research
- Science Fiction and the City
- Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Japanese Culture
For some students, coordinating a Student Directed Seminar opens up an academic environment to discuss topics that are not offered at UBC in a course setting.
“We’re so plugged into Twitter, Facebook, Google all the time. It’s so pervasive, and it was just crazy to me that there was no academic context to discuss its impacts at UBC,” said Caroline Durran, who then decided to create her own course, “Development and Democracy in the Age of Internet and New Media”.
“I don’t know if it was the students who got involved, or the subject matter, but this seminar was so dynamic. I wish we could have had more people in it, because registration filled up in the first 4 hours it was open!” said Durran.
