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How do I know which pathway is right for me?

You’ll discern this through classes and conversations with faculty and staff during your first year at EMU. 

EMU’s general education prepares you to be a wise, engaged professional and community builder. Across all pathways, you will build a high-demand toolkit for your career and your life:

  • Powerful Communication: Gather, critique, and present information effectively from diverse sources.

  • Adaptability & Innovation: Tackle quantitative and artistic challenges, learning to pivot and adapt to limitations.

  • Complex Problem-Solving: Synthesize knowledge from multiple disciplines to solve complex real-world issues.

  • Reflective Leadership: Learn to navigate diverse communities, stay curious about different beliefs, and intentionally resolve conflict.

Communication, Culture, and Creative Expression 

This pathway is designed for students who want to:

  • Describe different cultural and communal systems that frame one’s understanding of the world.
  • Explain how various forms of communication have been used and continue to be used to shape culture, public discourse, and perspectives to make social, religious, and political change.
  • Apply concepts of power and social structures to how meaning is shaped and communicated in various forms and different cultural contexts.
  • Develop various skills ethically to communicate ideas with empathy and sensitivity to reach a broad audience
  • Pathways Value emphasized:   Intercultural Understanding & Power & Equity

    This pathway is designed for students who want to develop skills in: intercultural curiosity, communicate ethically and with intercultural understanding and emphasis on justice, self-awareness regarding interpretative biases and power relationships, self-awareness on how symbols and representations function in personal and communal experience, ability to analyze cultural phenomena and meaning-making processes

    Technology, Ethics, and Society 

    This pathway is designed for students who want to:

    • Understand and describe the framework of scientific inquiry and decision making.
    • Identify different moral frameworks and apply ethical tools to scientific, technological and environmental dilemmas.
    • Apply the dimensions of sustainability (economic, ecological, social) to specific cases or disciplines, and evaluate issues and outcomes of potential solutions.
    • Develop skills to analyze and implement scientific ideas and technology ethically.
  • Pathways Value emphasized:   Environmental Sustainability & Faith & Meaning

    This pathway is designed for students who want to develop skills in: understanding of the language and values of science, understanding of science as it is applied in communities, understanding power and equity in the application of science, understanding processes of responding to scientific, technological, and environmental dilemmas through moral frameworks, ability to articulate questions and communicate ethical solutions to issues of sustainability in environment and technology

    Leadership for Justice and Social Change 

    This pathway is designed for students who want to:

    • Understand different ways in which communities and movements use power, develop solidarity, and create justice.
    • Describe and analyze how systems promote justice and positive change or allow inequities to persist.
    • Explain how values and moral frameworks inform leadership choices both individually and within communities.
    • Develop skills to reflect on leadership theories and practices that create communities of belonging
  • Pathways Value emphasized:  Power & Equity & Faith & Meaning

    This pathway is designed for students who want to develop skills in: respect for diversity and communities of belonging, leadership informed by empathy and desire for justice and equity, understanding how persons are shaped by various communities and structures, understanding systems of power and how structures can create disadvantages, promoting social change towards the common good, self-awareness of how one’s social location impacts leadership style and community dynamics

    Global Justice 

    This pathway is designed for students who want to:

    • Describe historical and cultural dynamics that impact the emergence of and changes in communities and social structures.
    • Understand various cultural perspectives on global justice topics, taking global views of contemporary issues across various geographic and social boundaries.
    • Describe the interrelation of local contexts and global events, and identify different cultural moral frameworks that contribute to dilemmas as well as solutions to communal challenges.
    • Develop various ethical skills to analyze perspectives and solutions for sustaining justice in interconnected communities.
  • Pathways Value emphasized:  Environmental Sustainability & Intercultural Understanding

    This pathway is designed for students who want to develop skills in: intercultural curiosity, global view and understanding how local and glocal systems interconnect, work ethically and with intercultural understanding and emphasis on justice, self-awareness regarding interpretative biases and power relationships, ability to articulate questions and communicate just solutions to global issues