A Gallatin Concentration

At Gallatin, there aren't typical majors. Instead, every student crafts an concentration around a theme, interest, professional pursuit, or some other unifying concept. There are no requirements for what you have to study - you can take classes around the University at any of the individual schools. You can intern for credit. You can even put together your own classes, either by yourself (with an advisor of course) or with a few other students (it's called a tutorial and it's also with an advisor).

In my case, my concentration stemmed from my interest in human behavior. Why do you do what you do? What draws you to a particular product? What influences how you participate in social groups? How do you participate in organizational structures? And how can we use our understanding of these things to modify our behavior (both from an individual and corporate perspective)? These questions (and more) have interested me for a while. But I felt that studying this just from a psychological perspective would not provide a complete picture - which is why Gallatin was a great fit for my interests. I took marketing classes to understand how we are exposed to brands and what drives decisions like product adoption. I took media classes to map how both old and new media influence the way we are exposed to and share information. And I took politics classes to consider the impact political leaders have on the public and how the public impacts our political leaders.

I know this seems like a lot of material to cover. It was. That's one of the great things about Gallatin though - I was able to take classes across the university in almost any department I wanted to, and I was able to meld them all together into one cohesive concentration. It helps that Gallatin offers a variety of interdisciplinary seminars that examine themes from a variety of perspectives. Some of the classes in Gallatin included "Finance for Social Theorists," "Looking at Popular Culture," "Democratic Persuasion," and more. Each of these seminars helps to weave together the disparate areas of study that make up an individual's concentration, and often they can take you in brand new directions you've never considered before.

Oh, and don't worry - that's a chimpanzee's brain in that jar. It's a picture by Gaetan Lee that's on Flickr and on Wikipedia (under brain). Did you really think I'd post a picture of a human brain? If you want to see one, then you should just go watch Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk on the brain. It's probably more interesting too.

So halfway through your time at Gallatin you have to write an Intellectual Autobiography and Plan for Concentration. Let's call it an IAPC as that's just a whole lot easier. The IAPC is "a brief, reflective essay of two to three pages about their intellectual development and their plans for designing the concentration." It's basically a roadmap.

The IAPC experience can be a formative one, providing direction for an individual concentration. It can also be a bit nerve-wracking, as it does require a bit of soul searching. Don't worry though - you can always modify your concentration as you continue your Gallatin experience.

Here's my IAPC for you to read.

One of the many opportunities at Gallatin is to create your own classes. Called tutorials, they're basically group independent studies with two to five students working together on a project or theme they're interested in. A highlight of my time at Gallatin was working on the "Are You Sustainable?" campaign with another student.

The Are You Sustainable campaign started as two tutorials called Advertising Democracy I and II. The goal was to "create a multimedia social marketing campaign designed to revitalize interest in democracy in the United States." Lofty, I know. The first semester we fleshed out our ideas, developing a social marketing plan and expanding some of my previous work into a solid foundation to build upon. The second semester was a bit more practical, converting the grand plans of what we called the Restart America campaign into something we could execute.

We knew that running a campaign to build interest in democracy was a bit impractical - after all, there was no way that my colleague and I were going to be able to throw together the kind of national advertising campaign we came up with by ourselves. So we began to consider how we could scale down into something feasible for the NYU community. We decided that given NYU's then-recent efforts to "go green," we would create a campaign focused on increasing awareness and discussion of sustainability efforts by the University and its students.

We ended up applying for Youth Venture's "Be a Changemaker Challenge," and were able to obtain $1000 of funding to work on our proof of concept project - the "Are You Sustainable?" campaign. We created the "Are You Sustainable?" website (which actually no longer exists) as a place for the various groups focused on environmental sustainability at NYU to come together, but (unfortunately for us) they decided to head in another direction. We also developed a social marketing plan designed to spread awareness of sustainability at NYU. Sadly it didn't go much further than that, but it was a great project to work on regardless, just for the educational experience alone.

The opportunities for tutorials like that are endless; they're only limited by the student's imagination (and their ability to find a faculty advisor).

By the way, if you want to read more about the Are You Sustainable campaign, you can check out a blog post I wrote about it for more information. In the next module, you'll be able to look through some concepts I designed for potential campaign advertisements.

Oh, and since I've posted quite a bit of my original work here, I guess it's time to say that everything here that I've written/created (which is everything except where noted) falls under the Creative Commons 3.0 license:



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

The colloquium is it. It's just about the end of your Gallatin experience. It's the last requirement you have to complete, and it'll probably be one of the most interesting experiences of your entire time at school. The colloquium is a two hour discussion with three faculty members on any subject you want (okay, they like it to be related to your concentration).

The first step in the colloquium process is to assemble a book list and write a rationale. The book list contains about 20 works, split into four categories - pre-Renaissance, modern social sciences, modern humanities, and your area of concentration. You then write the rationale, a three to five page essay on the general theme you discuss. You submit this a couple of months in advance.

You can read a little more about my colloquium on a post about it at my blog. I've also placed most of the books on my book list in the next few modules, as well as some books I've read and plan on reading related to the topic.