Fall Semester Brings New Program and Course Offerings

Students at Saint Joseph’s are finding more opportunities than ever to align their education with their professional goals and personal passions.

In addition to the opening of the new School of Health Studies and Education, a host of majors, minors, courses and certifications have been introduced with the start of the fall semester.

“We are consistently looking at various factors to determine what programs we should offer to our students,” explains Cheryl A. McConnell, Ph.D., provost and vice president for academic affairs. “We want to give each student the opportunity to build a curriculum that will bring them spiritual and intellectual fulfillment, help them find a good job and prepare them for the careers of the future.”

Among the new offerings are the following highlights:

College of Arts and Sciences

Undergraduate students can now declare a major in Art History. The program had existed previously only as a minor and encourages students to explore how art interacts with culture, politics, academia and religion throughout time.

Students interested in technology, data and mapping can also take a new interdisciplinary class, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems. The course will teach students the basic concepts and components of a GIS, which allows users to perform special analysis and create functional maps using different types of data, and introduces them to the tools used in the practice.

Graduate students can now enroll in a 30-credit, fully online master’s program in cybersecurity. Additionally, the Department of Computer Science has added a 5-year option for students who want to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in that time, and have added an artificial intelligence concentration to the master’s program in computer science. The new concentration is intended for students who wish to study the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as deep learning, visual perception, natural language understanding, text analysis and decision making.

As part of Saint Joseph’s academic stewardship of the Barnes Arboretum, the three-year, non-credit Barnes Horticultural Certificate Program has been added to the course roster. Previously offered through the Barnes Foundation, the program takes a comprehensive approach to horticultural science, methods and design. Students and graduates may elect to sit for the Pennsylvania Certified Horticulturist exam.

Haub School of Business

Students studying marketing, food marketing, pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing, real estate finance and risk management and insurance can now boost their résumés with a new sales certificate that will ready them to excel in their work immediately after graduation.

Beginning this semester, finance majors can earn Bloomberg Certification, which will identify them as advanced users of the Bloomberg Terminal, one of the most powerful tools in the financial world. The software has been part of finance classes at the University for several years; in January, the Haub School was recognized by Bloomberg as an Experiential Learning Partner .

Finance majors can also take a series of classes starting this semester that will serve as a Chartered Financial Analyst preparation program. Once the classes are complete, students will be able to sit for Chartered Financial Analyst certification.