Is your food safe? While exploring the food landscape of our global society we will be addressing the impact agricultural systems have on the safety of our food supply. Food is what nourishes our bodies and our minds. Most individuals are unaware of how food is grown and how easily we can damage the safety of this supply. In this seminar, we will become more aware of the impact that applications of pesticides, antibiotics, GMOs, organic growing practices, sustainable food systems, disease and pollution all have on the food we eat everyday.

The purpose of this course is to prepare exploratory track students to achieve academic success at UMass. The curriculum will aim to orient students to the health science fields and the major options within, assist students with major exploration outside of the health sciences, create strategies for academic success, transition to campus life and learn how to effectively navigate and utilize campus resources.

This class examines the effects of "going digital" since the introduction of the personal computer (1970s). As an introduction to this theme, we focus a range of interdisciplinary lenses onto the ethical and intellectual implications of "going digital" as it shapes thinking and making, playing and working, living and dying. Challenging standing notions of "digital nativity" and "the networked world," we study the limits imposed and possibilities opened by digital technologies and their effects on people, animals, plants and inorganic matter.

This course is the optional laboratory companion to BMX 100, the gateway course for the Biomathematical Sciences Concentration.  The laboratory is offered two evenings a week for the first four weeks of the semester.  The eight meetings are devoted to practice with a software package (Matlab, Rstudio, etc). BMX 101 is followed by BMX 100 during which students work in groups to apply software tools to two research questions.  Graded S/U only. Co-requisite: BMX 100. (E)

Topics course. This colloquium deals with the history and historiography of revolution and counter-revolution in Cold War Latin America. The course begins with readings and discussions of Global Revolt, Third World Revolution and the Cold War on global and regional scales before turning to revolutionary movements and counter-revolutionary and state violence in Latin America. We focus on the experiences of Guatemala, Chile and Argentina while also incorporating El Salvador and Cuba.

For first-year students and sophomores; juniors and seniors with permission of the course director. Perspectives on society, culture and social interaction. Topics include the self, emotions, culture, community, class, ethnicity, family, sex roles, deviance and economy. Colloquium format.

Convince. Debate. Respond. Foster consensus. Reason. Move your reader. Find a voice. Inspire action. This writing-intensive course develops the powers of persuasive writing and effective oral communication. Starting from the premise that writing well means engaging in conversation with others, students enter into dialogue with their peers about the self-selected topics that matter most to them. The semester builds toward a final in-class debate that dramatizes the give-and-take of academic arguments.