School of Arts and Sciences
About the School
Core curriculum
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS) is committed to providing a well-rounded general education for all of our students, regardless of their degree program. This includes emphases on writing, oral communication, critical reasoning, problem solving, social awareness, ethical values, and use of the scientific method to investigate the natural world.
To achieve this goal, the School of Arts and Sciences developed a core curriculum that is common to the degree requirements of every baccalaureate and first professional degree program offered at MCPHS. The core curriculum is one means through which the College achieves a core value: the integration of the basic sciences and liberal arts with professional studies.
Faculty who specialize in the health care dimensions of arts and sciences disciplines
All programs in the School of Arts and Sciences capitalize on our faculty specializations, Longwood Medical and Academic Area location, and unique institutional mission. Faculty conduct research in such areas as stress and illness, health care ethics, communication in the health professions, literature and medicine, medical anthropology, and mathematical biology. All Arts and Sciences faculty, however, share a primary commitment to undergraduate education; they teach first-year classes as well as advanced students and are readily available for both academic assistance and career advising.
School of Arts and Sciences undergraduate programs
The School of Arts and Sciences offers degree programs on the Boston campus in Chemistry, Health Psychology, Medicinal and Molecular Biology, Premedical and Health Studies, and Public Health, as well as opportunities to combine a BS in Premedical and Health Studies with an advanced professional degree.
Advantages of majoring in the arts and sciences
Majoring in an arts and sciences degree program offers distinctive advantages to students:
- An interdisciplinary emphasis that balances basic and laboratory science with the liberal arts to prepare the kind of well-rounded applicant that graduate programs, employers and medical schools favor
- Specialized courses such as drugs and behavior, mind/body medicine, interpersonal communication in the health professions, cigarettes in American culture and evolution of the health professions that are taught by faculty who research and publish in these subjects
- Relatively small programs that assure access to key faculty, from matriculation through graduation