The BU Hub
Why Do We Have the BU Hub?
Our innovative general education program, the BU Hub, prepares all of our undergraduates to navigate a rapidly changing, diverse, and interconnected world. It will introduce you to the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that our faculty have identified as essential to thrive and to lead in the twenty-first century.
Your major will allow you to explore a field in great depth. Your work in the BU Hub will familiarize you with a broad range of fields and will position you to understand and collaborate with experts from other disciplines.
The BU Hub and You
As you learn more about the Hub, you will see that it empowers you to make choices about your educational pathway. Rather than consisting of a small set of “general education courses,” the Hub is interwoven throughout the undergraduate curriculum, and there are over 900 courses in the Hub. In order to make the most of the flexibility the program offers, you will need to spend some time on the Hub website to learn how it works.
While you should familiarize yourself with the BU Hub before registering for classes, you’ll have lots of time on campus to learn more about it, and you have all four years to fulfill your BU Hub requirements. Therefore, when you choose courses for your first semester, you should focus on exploring or embarking upon a major. Because many of the courses required for majors are also Hub courses, you will automatically fulfill some Hub requirements as you pursue your major.
Remember – your CAS First-Year Advisor will be available all year to talk with you about the Hub! Below is some important introductory information.
The Structure of the BU Hub
The BU Hub is designed around six essential capacities that can be described broadly as ways of thinking:
- Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Historical Interpretation
- Scientific Inquiry and Social Inquiry
- Quantitative Reasoning
- Diversity, Civic Engagement, and Global Citizenship
- Communication
- Intellectual Toolkit
These six capacities each consist of multiple areas. For example, the Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Historical Interpretation capacity is made up of three Hub areas:
Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Historical Interpretation →
- Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings
- Aesthetic Exploration
- Historical Consciousness
The areas are what you will study, and when you complete a course that covers an area, you will earn a Hub “unit” in that area.
A single course can cover several Hub areas, so you will sometimes earn more than one Hub unit in a course. Most students will meet all of their Hub requirements in 10 – 12 courses, and some of those courses will also count for major requirements.
Searching for BU Hub Courses
To find out whether or not a course carries Hub units, you can use the Course Description Search in a couple of different ways.
If you have a particular course in mind, enter the course number or the course title in the search field in the center of the screen, and then click the red magnifying glass (the search button). For instance, if you wanted to know whether the Religion course “CAS RN 106 Death and Immortality” carried Hub units, you could enter “CAS RN 106” OR “Death and Immortality” in the search field and then click on the red search icon to the right of the semester box.
You should initially see the course title listed. Click on the upside-down triangle on the right-hand side for a more detailed description. Your search would return the following result:
From this description, you can see this course covers three Hub areas and that it will be offered in Fall 2021.
Alternatively, if you want to search for courses that fulfill particular units, you can click on ‘Additional Search Options’ in the center of the screen, then scroll down to ‘BU Hub Areas.’ If you select an area and click the search button, you will see a list of all BU courses that carry a Hub unit in that area (that are offered in your selected semester). You can further refine your search by the School/College in which courses are offered, by semester offered, by keywords, and by number of credits. (Please note: You are encouraged to look at 4-credit courses in CAS. If you have other courses in mind, you are encouraged to speak with your advisor to make sure you are eligible.)
If you select more than one Hub area in the drop-down menu, you have the option to see a list of courses that carry all of the units you selected or to see a list that carries any of the units selected. For example, say you search for “Philosophical Interpretation and Life’s Meanings,” and “Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy.” You’ll have the option to select any or all, depending on how you want to search:
If you select all, your search will return a list of courses that fulfill both selected Hub areas:
If you select any, your search will return a list of courses that fulfill any of the selected Hub areas:
Finally, you can see a list of the Hub courses offered for each area on the BU Hub website. This list will give you a sense of how the Hub allows you to explore while meeting requirements. For instance, if you click on “Quantitative Reasoning I,” and look through the list of courses, you will see that you can fulfill this requirement by taking a course in the College of Arts & Sciences (ranging from Astronomy to Linguistics to Physics, and more), the College of Fine Arts, the College of General Studies, the College of Engineering, the Questrom School of Business, or the Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.