The Gettysburg Curriculum

The Gettysburg Curriculum aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to navigate a rapidly changing global environment and seeks to inspire our students to lead lives of meaning, service, and consequence.

There are two hallmarks of the Gettysburg Curriculum:

We ask students to be self-reflective, to write and think in ways that express a growing self-awareness about the progress and impact of their education.
We ask students to make connections in what they are learning, to see relevant implications across courses, to achieve an education that is more than a transcript of self-contained courses.

While completing their studies at Gettysburg College, students must complete 32 course units, including a major field of study and the following curricular requirements. For Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Music Education, students must complete a total of 36 course units.

For students entering Gettysburg College Fall of 2025 or later

The Curriculum has four core components:

The Gettysburg Seminars

First-Year Seminar. The Gettysburg Curriculum begins with our first-year seminars, which offer small, intense intellectual communities that foster active learners engaged with a wide range of topics.

Sophomore Seminar: Communities and Change. During their sophomore year students take a course in which they consider the structures and processes that facilitate local, national, and/or global community engagement and learn how they can be agents of change.

First-Year Critical Skills

First-Year Writing. During their first year, all Gettysburg students take a course that introduces them to the foundational concepts and skills they need to develop as flexible, effective communicators. Students can expect to create texts for a variety of audiences and purposes and to use writing not just as a means of communicating but as a means of thinking and learning.

First-Year Data and Society. Gettysburg students take a course in their first year in which they learn basic skills of data literacy and discuss the process of data collection and the use (and misuse) of quantitative information. Students learn about these topics within the context of issues of social importance and will understand the tools of data analysis as well as the limitations that are often encountered when gathering and interpreting data.

Note: First-Year Seminar can also count toward one of the First-Year Critical Skills.

Modes of Inquiry

All students must take five distinct courses in which they produce works representative of the arts, formal sciences, humanities, laboratory-based natural sciences, and social sciences. These courses may also overlap with those that students take to satisfy requirements in the Perspective and Social Change area or their major.

Perspectives and Social Change

By fulfilling these requirements, students will gain an increased awareness of how cultural contexts and identities intersect and shape perspectives and behaviors, understand how power and oppression are manifested in one’s lives and communities, and develop skills to communicate across diverse groups of people.

Non-Native Language. All students will take a two-course sequence in the same language. AP Credit can be used for at most one of these courses. All F-1 visa- holding students whose native language is not English will be exempt from this requirement. Other students whose native language is not English will be able to work with the Academic Standing Committee to find alternative paths to meeting this requirement.

Identities and Culture. Identities and cultural contexts impact one’s worldview and perspectives. The ability to meaningfully engage with culturally different others and recognize how thoughts and behaviors could be socio-culturally grounded will help students to develop intercultural competence. All students will take a course that considers how identities and cultural contexts (within and/or outside the U.S.) intersect with, reflect, and shape one’s perspectives and experiences. This course will develop students’ analytical and reflective abilities to help them understand how cultural worldview frameworks are developed and increase their cultural self- awareness.

Race, Power, and Equity. All students will take a course that considers the institutional, structural, and cultural components of race, power, and inequity. The course goes beyond recognition of racial differences to explore power structures behind racial differences.

Your Gettysburg education doesn’t end with the Academic Program. Knowledge and enduring skills at Gettysburg College are practiced and deepened through our Guided Pathways program, which provides students with an intentional approach to their co-curricular experiences. Every incoming student will have the opportunity to align their interests with on-campus experiences within a thematic Guided Pathway.

For students entering Gettysburg College prior to Fall of 2025

The curriculum is structured around four key elements:

Multiple Inquiries

Gettysburg College students are required to engage in multiple forms of inquiry -- in the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, and natural sciences -- in a self-conscious and intentional way. We expect students to learn a variety of approaches, to apply them aptly, and to understand their value and their limitations.

Integrative Thinking

We believe our graduates should know how to integrate what they have learned. It is not enough to have compartmentalized knowledge. Integrative thinking is required to create solutions, to develop new ideas, to exert leadership.

Communication Skills

Today we are all drowning in information. An effective education must teach students how to evaluate information, to marshal relevant evidence persuasively, and to communicate effectively -- in person, in writing, and in technologically enhanced ways.

Informed Citizenship

We want our graduates to be at home in the world and to be engaged citizens with a global perspective. Understanding and valuing forms of difference, entering another worldview through language, study in another land -- these are valuable in shaping a sense of engagement in the world.