Undergraduate

Anthropology is the study of human beings and their cultures, past and present, throughout the world.

The discipline examines and compares the world’s culture patterns in all their variety and studies humans as biological organisms. Through archaeology, it attempts to shed light on the long history and evolution of humans and their ways of life. In these pursuits, anthropologists favor comparative and evolutionary perspectives. As a result, anthropological studies are wide-ranging with respect to topic and far-reaching with respect to both space and time.

An anthropology degree prepares students for excellent jobs and opens doors to many different career paths. As such, it leads not only to obvious career trajectories for graduate school in the field, but also serves as a major rated highly by law and medical school admissions officers, who value liberal arts majors and in particular majors that broaden the perspective of their prospective students. In addition, those with anthropology undergraduate degrees are in increasing demand in areas such as marketing, social science teaching, user interface design (all the more important given the increasing saturation of our experience by mobile, digitally-networked technologies), consumer research, and global NGOs.

The specific skills that anthropology undergraduates can gain, such as ethnographic research techniques (including participant observation, open-ended interviewing, statistics, archival research, and others), and cultural resource management skills are in demand by institutions (both companies, government agencies, and NGOs) seeking to access empirical data not otherwise captured through the quantitative techniques prevalent in other social sciences. The nature of the questions asked by all of these institutions has changed with the advent of globalization and digitally networked technology.