General Studies Program

The mission of the General Studies Program (GSP) at NAU is to advance informed, responsible, productive, and self-reflective citizens of the world who possess knowledge from a variety of disciplines and utilize a range of crucial transferable skills.

Students laughing and collaborating on a project in a CCJ classroom.

Overview

Aligned with Arizona Board of Regents’ policy for general education, NAU’s General Studies Program offers engaging learning experiences guided by NAU’s strategic priorities of Academic Excellence, Student Success, and Commitment to Indigenous Peoples.

Credit completion

The GSP is an interdisciplinary program that all undergraduate students complete in addition to courses for their major. Through this program, students complete 34 credits of coursework in English and Math Foundations and in the knowledge areas of Arts and Humanities, Sciences, American Institutions, and Social and Political Worlds. Embedded in designated knowledge area courses are the Global, US Ethnic, and Indigenous Peoples Inclusive Perspectives.

Empowered students

This program contextualizes a student’s major and provides them with transferable knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits of mind that foster civic engagement, the ability to respond and adapt to real-world experiences, participation in an inclusive workforce, and the capacity to solve problems in innovative ways. Through interdisciplinary coursework, students hone their skills in writing, speaking, information literacy, quantitative reasoning, collaboration and teamwork, ethics, and critical thinking, and they integrate the habits of mind of curiosity, intellectual integrity, persistence, and self-awareness in their personal and professional lives.