When Elizabeth Spergel ’12 decided to pursue the University Major, she knew it would provide her with the opportunity to design a program that caters to her specific interests and abilities. She knew it has been completed by some of the campus’ best-known figures, including President Michael Roth. She also knew, however, that the process of approval for a student’s program remains one of the most difficult courses of study to pursue.

“I’ve heard that it’s practically impossible to get them to allow you to pursue a University Major,” Spergel said.

Spergel refers to the Committee on University Majors, a group of faculty members charged with approving student proposals. A subsection of the Educational Policy Committee, the committee is chaired by Professor of Classical Studies Andrew Szegedy-Maszak and includes two other faculty members from different disciplines selected by Szegedy-Maszak and Dean Marina Melendez, who coordinates the University Major.

In order to be considered for approval by the committee, students who wish to complete the University Major must provide two letters of support from faculty members and gather a group of three faculty members, each from a different discipline, who will agree to be the student’s advisors throughout the process. The student must also complete a senior essay, thesis, performance or exhibit, as well as submit a two-to-three page proposal detailing their intent.

Some students, however, see the extensive application process as among the program’s benefits. The many requirements force students to both carefully evaluate their reasons for creating a new major, and determine a productive way to complete their major’s requirements.

For students like Chiara Di Lello ’10, whose Muslim Studies major includes courses from the History, Religion, Sociology and Less Commonly Taught Languages Departments, among others, the application process proved extremely helpful.

“Completing the application… forced me to develop a clear idea of my justification and academic goals, as well as a good sense of the courses and professors on campus that could support me,” Di Lello said. “The process is long and involved, but not in a bad way. It is exigent, which ultimately is to the benefit of the student: by expanding on and revising your proposal you end up with a clear path of study that is challenging and academically rigorous.”

Students decide to design their own major for different reasons. Some enter the University with the intent to create their own customized course of study. Spergel, for example, says she plans on incorporating aspects of philosophy, sociology and psychology to explore the origins and development of human identity. For others, like Di Lello, they are inspired by a combination of classes they take or a particularly inspiring professor.

“The major grew out of a couple of courses that piqued my interest in the Muslim world, the evolution of the faith over time, and the larger cultural and political questions facing Islam and its practitioners today,” she said.

As Di Lello and Spergel prove, students’ programs combine many different disciplines. Although this gives students the freedom to explore, it can also be difficult to find and schedule the variety of different courses needed. At least eight 200-level or higher courses are required to complete the University Major.

This process can be among the major’s most challenging aspects of the major, according to Devaka Gunawardena ’09, who is completing a University Major in Postcolonial Studies.

“Professors come and go and offer courses at different times, so it can be a bit difficult to try and pick courses far in advance,” he said. “I needed to be flexible while maintaining some guiding principles in order to justify course changes to the committee and myself.”

Like Di Lello, Gunawardena’s major reflects how students cross reference different subjects in order to create a distinct path of study with clear objectives. He is focusing on East Africa and South Asia through the lens of “Orientalism” in order to examine notions of “the West.” Gunawardena incorporated classes from the Anthropology, History and English Departments, in part, to reevaluate these disciplines’ methods of study and underlying assumptions.

“My major… is in part a critique of self-making principles in the academy, especially as we are writing within many disciplines that came out of the birth of European modernity,” he said. “My major is meant to deal with the consequences of Edward Said’s landmark text “Orientalism” (and his predecessors) in opening up a new field of study that examines, for example, representations as incontrovertible ’facts,’ and the power of narration.”

But Gunawardena wasn’t satisfied by just taking advantage of the University Major. He has become an advocate for the program, working with the deans to answer questions and clear up doubts about the major. Through more active publicity efforts, he believes the quantity of applicants would grow, without affecting the quality of those ultimately selected.

“It [would] result in increased applications, but the committee wouldn’t need to be any less rigorous in approving a possible major” he said.

Though she understands the difficult road ahead, Spergel views the opportunity to fully explore the topics of most interest to her as more valuable than any anxieties she may have about the program.

“Part of what makes this topic so dynamic and fascinating to me is the multiplicity of approaches which can be used and the resulting overlap as well as divergence in conclusions” she said in an e-mail. “Rather than having to sit through four years of wondering how I could have considered what I’m studying differently, the University Major would enable me to become fairly well acquainted with alternative approaches and would hopefully structure and explicitly pursue the elements of each discipline that I feel are significant.”