International Studies
The International Studies Minor Program provides Fitchburg State College students in all majors with exciting opportunities to examine and explore international and interdisciplinary challenges of globalization and communication, multicultural awareness and diversity, citizenship and the world, literature and the arts.
These areas relate to international studies and their accompanying categories of course requirements of the Minor’s Program and in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Program. For more information, please contact Dr. Joshua Spero, Coordinator of the International Studies Minor Program in the Department of Political Science (jspero@fsc.edu; 978-665-3214).
Our program includes both U.S. and international students to provide a wealth of knowledge, insight, and activity. Our goal is to increase our global awareness and abilities to interact with peoples from diverse cultures and perspectives. Appreciation of other cultures offers an opportunity for students from all majors to enhance their abilities to become more globally aware and politically active.
Our students increasingly study abroad and return to the campus with a richer grasp of how International Studies affects their preparation for graduation—helping them to diversify and expand their career aspirations and options.
In tandem with the college’s Office of International Education, the Grants Center, and the International Advisory Committee, the International Studies Minor Program remains integral to how Fitchburg State College helps its students, faculty, librarians, staff, and administration become more aware of the world around them.
Taken together, the International Studies Minor Program makes people more knowledgeable about the world's peoples, cultures, and languages so that they become more globally competent and better equipped for an increasingly interconnected and complicated world.
Because we live in a world where so much information, technology, and financing drive us to update and revise constantly and quickly, people often need to “learn on the job.” What the International Studies Minor Program achieves for our college’s our students, faculty, librarians, staff, and administration focuses on creative and flexible problem solving—internationally at local levels and vice-versa.
By comprehending the historical depth and social complexity of global issues, our objectives concentrate on improving the vision and broadening of the scholarly thought process, for us to “think on our feet” more effectively. Our hope centers on our program’s graduates crafting skills and talents to decipher the complex world better and recognize its intricacies, as best as we can, by developing notions, perhaps solutions, to seemingly intractable global problems.
Thus, the International Studies Minor Program enables our students, faculty, librarians, staff, and administration to shape their international experiences at Fitchburg State College comprehensively, including how students can integrate study abroad into the Program’s requirements. The areas of concentration involve:
A. Communication, History, or Political Science
B. Business or Economics
C. Art, Music or Dance
D. Language, Literature, Culture or Sociology
Please don’t hesitate to contact Dr. Spero for further information.
Dr. Joshua Spero, Fitchburg State College Coordinator of the International Studies Minor Program and Associate Professor of Political Science, presents the International Studies Program Keynote Address Award to Dr. Jessica Stern, Academic Director of the Program on Terrorism and the Law at Harvard Law School and Lecturer in Government at Harvard University, on 11 April 2007, as part of Fitchburg State College's International Week.
