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The Five College Certificate in Culture, Health, and Science (CHS) is a rigorous complement to any traditional major, allowing students to deepen their knowledge of human health, disease, and healing through interdisciplinary inquiry. Drawing on hundreds of courses, numerous research and community-based learning opportunities as well as international education programs offered across the consortium, students work with a CHS advisor to design a plan of study that links the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In addition, students are expected to conduct an independent capstone project or internship.

The best health practitioners, researchers, and policy analysts need to understand how behavior influences disease distribution, how biomedical categories change across time and culture, and how political and socioeconomic factors are integral to both intervention protocols and the manifestation of disease. They also must understand how to interpret and communicate research results to audiences of policy makers and to the general public. The interdisciplinary CHS training is aimed at developing these skills. Graduate programs and medical schools are giving greater attention to interdisciplinary training, recognizing that tomorrow's health experts will need to know how to link their understandings of history, culture, and behavior with clinical and epidemiologic models of health and disease.

Students successfully completing the requirements in consultation with a certificate advisor and to the satisfaction of the Five College Culture Health and Science Steering Committee are awarded the certificate upon graduation.

Learn more about finding an advisor, recommended courses and certificate procedures at www.fivecolleges.edu/chs.

Certificate Requirements:

Under the guidance of faculty program advisors on each campus, students choose a sequence of seven courses available across the five campuses and identify an independent research project that will count toward the certificate.  The seven required courses are to be distributed across the following five categories of inquiry:

• Category I: Biocultural Approaches:  Interdisciplinary and/or comparative approaches that explore the interdependent influences on human health and disease
• Category 2: Mechanisms of Disease Transmission: Mechanisms of disease growth and transmission within individuals and populations
• Category 3: Population, Health, and Disease: Exploring the relationships among social, behavioral, economic, and other aggregate population forces on human health and disease
• Category 4: Ethics, Policy, and Practice: Covering structures of knowledge about health and healthcare decision-making, including ethical and philosophical issues and their corresponding policy platforms, as well as the implementation of healthcare in practice
• Category 5: Research Design and Analysis:  Concepts of evidence, data collection, research ethics, measurement, and modes of Analysis
• Independent Research Project, Capstone Project or Internship
• Students must receive a grade of “B” or better in each of their seven chosen courses. No course can be used to satisfy more than one category. At least four of the courses must be above introductory level. No more than four courses can “double count” toward a student’s major.