Learn to speak with confidence and clarity about your summer internship or research project. Connect it to you academic coursework. What have you learned? How is it useful? What are your next steps? Students will reflect on their experience and collaborate with others to generate useful knowledge. Required for the Nexus but open to all students. For more information, email nexus@mtholyoke.edu.

From mutualism to parasitism, symbiotic interactions are a universal feature of life. In this seminar we will study the mechanisms underlying symbiotic interactions and consider their significance for the ecology and evolution of organisms.

This class will expose students to modeling and simulation of physical systems. Drawing on examples from a number of different disciplines, the course will cover modeling and analyzing a physical system, using models to predict behavior. Students will strengthen programming skills and learn additional computational skills necessary for simulation in areas such as population growth, disease spread, heat transfer, projectile motion.

Building large software systems introduces new challenges to software development. Appropriate design decisions and programming methodology can make a major difference in developing software that is correct and maintainable. In this course, students will learn techniques and tools that are used to build correct and maintainable software, improving their skills in designing, writing, debugging, and testing software. Topics include object-oriented design, testing, design patterns, software architecture, and designing concurrent and fault tolerant systems. This course is programming intensive.

Introduction to the field of computer science with a theme of computing in environmental studies. This course introduces students to algorithms, basic data structures, and programming techniques. Students will explore using computing to interpret data relating to global temperature changes, ocean currents, earthquakes, and water quality.

The goal of the seminar is to redesign the Ancient Gallery in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum to present a more global selection of artifacts and themes of cross-cultural exchange. Students will engage in firsthand study of ancient artifacts from Greece, Rome, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China. In the process, we consider the collecting and display of ancient objects from antiquity to the present and current and past controversies about excavation, plunder, and cultural patrimony.

This course will begin with an introduction to number theory, covering material on congruences, prime numbers, arithmetic functions, primitive roots, quadratic residues, and quadratic fields. We will then continue our study of number theory by picking special topics which might include some of the following: Finite Fields, Prime Factorization of Ideals, Fermat's Last Theorem, Elliptic curves, Dirichlet's Theorem on Arithmetic Progressions, the Prime Number Theorem, or the Riemann Zeta function.

This course asks students to explore the sculptural possibilities of printmaking while examining ideas of the multiple. Both traditional printmaking (relief printmaking and screenprinting) and various digital methods are employed to push the boundaries of "print media" as a contemporary art practice. Class projects will include print installation and print media driven social interventions. Students will work both collaboratively and independently to explore ideas of space, scale, and the multiple, while creating interactive three-dimensional print media work.

How do astronomers determine the nature and extent of the universe? Centering around the theme of the "Cosmic Distance Ladder," we explore how astrophysics has expanded our comprehension to encompass the entire universe. Topics include: the size of the solar system; parallactic and spectroscopic distances of stars; star counts and the structure of our galaxy; Cepheid variables and the distances of galaxies; the Hubble Law and large-scale structure in the universe; quasars and the Lyman-Alpha Forest.