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Hi, I'm Michele Kuhnle.
I'm Katie Brown.
My name is Elena Cohen.
I am a senior at Mount Holyoke and a critical social thought major.
I think that being a CST major means that you can make connections
between different departments.
Students come in with an area of interest, or three areas of interest, or twenty.
By your sophomore year, you come up with a problem or a question or a
field of study that really interests you.
They tend to come in with some sort of dissatisfaction with the ways in which
other disciplines address whatever it is that they're interested in.
You can come up with a proposal and you take courses that you select
and they can be from any department, as long as you can make your case for
taking that course and including it in your major.
Looking at the people, for example, who are in the capstone seminar...
There are people who have taken a lot of art classes and there are
people who have taken more politics classes or economics classes...
The range their interests cover, it's mind-blowing.
Like I've taken history classes, gender studies classes,
some economics classes, some CST classes.
What has been so wonderful about this program for me is that I've been able
to really take things from biology, economics, politics, and environmental studies,
and really combine them beautifully in ways to help me solve my problem.
And then there are the CST core courses, which give you a theoretical background
through which you analyze all of the information in other fields
that you're taking in.
That's what I really, really like about it-- getting to that down beneath,
nitty gritty part of not just what the other disciplines can incorporate,
but how they came to incorporate them, why they incorporate them,
why it's useful to look at things from an anthropological perspective in one way
and a political perspective in another context.
The great thing about CST is that students go on to do work in a variety different fields.
Some people go on to become academics, which I think is one sort of path
to take thinking in.
I see myself going into environmental law school.
I think that I've gained the tools necessary
to argue persuasively about really anything and to critically evaluate what's going on
today.
But also people go on to work in nonprofits and do more activist--
there's a sort of social justice bend to CST as well.
Anybody who sees the connections between different fields would be wonderful for CST.
Especially if they look deeply and thoughtfully at a given process.