Five new electives will be offered next year, the largest single-year expansion of the elective catalogue in recent memory. Selection opens with the normal subject-choice window; all five run for a full year.
| Elective | Department | Places |
|---|---|---|
| Data Literacy and Statistics in the Wild | Mathematics | 24 |
| Environmental Field Science | Science | 20 |
| Journalism Practicum | Languages | 18 |
| Introduction to Design and Fabrication | Arts and Technology | 16 |
| Philosophy: Arguments That Changed Minds | Humanities | 24 |
The journalism practicum will be taught in cooperation with this publication’s faculty adviser, with student work eligible for publication in MU Student News. (In line with our editorial policy, this article was edited by staff not involved in the practicum.)
“The common thread is that every one of these ends in something you made or did, not only something you studied,” said curriculum coordinator David Iversen. “A dataset you analysed, a field study, a published article, an object, a defended argument.”
How selection works
Electives are chosen through the usual portal window. Where a course is oversubscribed, places are allocated by the standard priority rules, and the coordinator’s office said popular courses will be considered for a second section the following year rather than expanded mid-year.
Course descriptions with full details are available in the portal catalogue.
How the five were chosen
The additions emerged from last spring’s curriculum survey, in which students could propose electives freely — producing 63 suggestions that the coordinator’s office grouped, ranked by demand, and tested against staffing reality. Data literacy was the single most-requested subject by a wide margin. Two popular proposals did not survive the staffing test and remain on file: astronomy, pending an instructor, and a second modern language, pending, in Iversen’s words, “a budget conversation above my pay grade.”
Each new elective will be reviewed after its first year against enrolment, completion and student feedback — the same review that retired two low-enrolment electives to make timetable room for these.
One administrative change accompanies the expansion: for the first time, students may list a reserve choice for each elective slot, applied automatically if the first choice is full. The office expects this to end the annual scramble of mid-summer reallocation emails, which last year involved, by Iversen’s count, “one hundred and forty conversations that a form field could have had for us.”
