Program Overview
HEAR FRom KAPLAN SCHOLARS THEMSELVES!
Why should you apply to the Kaplan Humanities Scholars program? These Fall 2023 Kaplan Scholars tell you what they loved most about the program!
Why the Humanities?
One of the functions of the humanities is to preserve, extend, and revise traditional forms of knowledge in an ever-changing world. This enterprise is epitomized in the central humanistic concept of "critical thinking," and the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program represents critical thinking at its best. In a sequence of two courses in the fall, about ninety incoming first-year students selected to be Kaplan Scholars are challenged to integrate a variety of intellectual methods. The themes of the program rigorously probe the qualitative aspects of human experience, and they are large, bold, and ambitious: Protest, Alternative Americas; Marriage; Drugs (Click HERE to see descriptions of past Kaplan Scholars courses).
Throughout the fall, the Kaplan Scholars form a particularly close cohort as they work together with award-winning teachers drawn from a range of humanities disciplines—literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, language and culture studies, art history, anthropology, religious studies, classics, political science and other humanities and humanistic social sciences. As befits its place at the heart of the humanities, the program focuses on reading, writing, and discussion, and each student’s analytical skills are honed through intensive engagement with these practices. The Kaplan Scholars learn to form complex opinions, to argue for important values, and to discriminate among competing forms of evidence. One of the signature features of the program is its extension of education beyond the classroom: students and professors attend performances and visit museums and other cultural and historical sites in addition to participating in the usual lectures and seminars.
An intensive preparation for the broadest possible range of programs and pursuits, the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program is for the college’s most adventurous and imaginative minds, no matter what their intended major or field of study.
Here's another video where other past Kaplan Scholars talk about their experience in the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program.
