In the 2018-2019 school year, Elizabethtown College introduced nine new majors on campus. These majors include business data science, chemistry laboratory science, criminal justice, data science, engineering: biomedical and civil, financial economics, graphic design and marketing.

These majors include classes that have been available through the College for an extended period of time. For example, the criminal justice major includes classes from the sociology-anthropology, psychology and political science departments, as well as some forensics classes.

Students with this major take classes such as criminology, juvenile law and justice and forensic anthropology. For the data science major, students take computer science, data science and mathematics classes.

Some of these majors, such as marketing and criminal justice, have existed as concentrations but have now been made into independent majors as well.

“As a department, we were driven by the recognition that students were interested in majoring in criminal justice,” professor of sociology and Department Chair Dr. Conrad Kanagy said.

Student interest is a very large component in why these concentrations have become independent majors.

The concentrations were not necessarily replaced by the majors, but for the moment, the two coexist.

“People did not understand the term ‘concentrations,’ and it was not drawing people in, so it impacted people’s decisions of what school they wanted to go to,” Kanagy said.

Specifically, criminal justice was a major until the 2013-2014 academic year, which marked the switch to the criminology concentration from the full major. According to professor of anthropology Dr. Robert Wheelersburg, the sociology department hosted the criminal justice major for 10 years, producing 110 graduates.

One of the students who was previously involved in the criminology concentration of the sociology-anthropology department but has since switched to the criminal justice major is junior Hunter Klena.

Klena says that he chose the major over the concentration because he believes that having the major will result in a better repertoire with future employers after college.

He began his time at Etown as an art major but after his freshman year, “it occurred to [him] that [he] might be better suited to impact the world more in the criminal justice field.”

From the perspective of staff writer Meghan Kenney:

During winter break of the last academic year, I decided to create an individualized major that I called criminology because I wanted my major to focus more on criminology than sociology (like the concentration).

Kanagy was my major advisor, and he said that he had been trying to make criminal justice into a full major again since there was an increase in student interest.

When I presented my four year plan for my proposed individualized major to Kanagy, he then took that plan, revised it and brought it to the Board of Trustees, which then approved the major.

Wheelersburg then took on the major as the main advisor for students deciding to study within the criminal justice major.

Many students do not understand that there is an option at Etown to create what is called an “individualized major,” as I did originally.

This option is a very doable and exclusive opportunity to take a coalition of classes that already exist at the institution and turn them into a major that the school is lacking.

If a student wants to pursue this option, there is a form on the Etown website which requires advisor signatures, a personal statement about why the individualized major is necessary given the circumstances, the exact courses that a student with the individualized major would be taking and the Signature Learning Experiences (SLEs) that would be covered by this proposed major.

The student would then have to get the form signed by the proposed advisors of the major and the Dean of Curriculum and Assessment. This form then gets distributed—one copy to the student, one to each advisor and one to the registrar’s office.

I am not the only student at Etown who has completed this process. Another student, sophomore Matthew Smith, has an individualized major in Middle Eastern Studies.

“I think Etown is unique in the sense that you truly get the chance to study what you want, even if it means creating an individualized major,” he said. “My individualized major in Middle Eastern Studies allows me to compliment my History major with knowledge of an area of the world that I would like to study further following getting my undergraduate degree.”