Office of Undergraduate Affairs

Undergraduate Affairs News

The Office of Undergraduate Affairs distributes a monthly newsletter to undergraduate students from September to May each year. All undergraduate students automatically receive this newsletter and sign-up is not required. Brandeis faculty and staff who wish to receive this newsletter can subscribe. 

 

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Message from the Vice Provost

Dear Students,

Greetings and welcome back to campus for the new semester. I hope you had time to rest, decompress, recover, and spend some quality time with family and friends over the winter break. Though we’re only a week into the new term, there’s already a lot going on.

My colleagues and I have been hard at work over the last several months to execute on aspects of President Levine’s vision for the applied liberal arts at Brandeis. Central to that effort is a revision of the Brandeis Core. The changes we are currently discussing with the faculty are focused on two general goals.

First, we are aligning the learning outcomes from the core requirements with the most widely sought after career competencies (sometimes called “durable skills”), as determined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) based on its broad survey of the job landscape for recent college graduates. Under the current Brandeis Core, we are providing students meaningful preparation in many of these competencies, so a good deal of the changes that are currently under discussion will be in renaming and reframing what we are already doing. But we believe this is important because it will help our graduates be better prepared to make their cases to potential employers about why they are right for the job.

Second, in addition to this repackaging, we are also working to make the Brandeis Core more streamlined, to enable students to complete the requirements more quickly, thereby allowing them to move into their majors sooner and freeing up time for more intensive and extensive co-curricular learning experiences, like internships, externships, community service, research assistantships, and others.

To be clear, as current students, you will continue to follow the requirements of the old Brandeis Core, but we believe that the changes these revisions entail will also provide new opportunities for those already enrolled, as well, including access to micro credentials in these durable skills and to more extensive career counseling and experiential learning opportunities.

I am also very pleased to share with you a new effort my office has undertaken in collaboration with the Student Union leadership, specifically aimed at creating more opportunities to spend time with and get to know our wonderful faculty. Last semester I sent out a message to the faculty asking them if they had hobbies they would like to share with students. I was delighted by the enthusiastic response we received, with more than fifty separate faculty members offering to share their love of activities running the gamut from bike-riding and hiking to cooking and music and so much more.

The response was so overwhelming, in fact, that it became clear we could not organize activities for all these different hobbies, so in consultation with Student Union leadership we selected four activities with which to begin:

  • Baking with Dean Sara Shostak and Professor Stephanie Murray
  • Cooking with Professor Xiwen Lu
  • Collaging with Professor Tanishia Williams
  • Board Games with Professors Katherine Shulenberger, Brian Michael, and Stephanie
We are now in the process of scheduling these events and as soon as we have further details we will be sharing them in a separate announcement. I am very excited about this initiative, and I hope it will be a way for you to learn more about your professors, to see them as more than subject matter experts, as full human beings whose lives encompass far more than the work they do at Brandeis. And I also hope it will become a fun way for you to get to know each other outside of the pressures of the classroom environment.

That’s it for now. Wishing you all an enriching and successful new semester.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey

Upcoming Deadlines & Events

Date(s) Deadline/Event
November 21 - January 26 Registration for Spring 2026 classes
January 12 First day of instruction
January 20, 5:30 p.m. ENACT's "Legally Black" Panel
January 22, 6:00 p.m. Join URCC in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium for boba tea!
January 23 Deadline for Udall Scholarship (Sophomores and Juniors)
January 26 All work for fall term 2025 incompletes due to instructors. Last day for seniors graduating in May to declare or drop a major or minor.
January 27, 6:00 p.m. in Feldberg Lounge "What Matters to Me and Why" with Jonathan Krones (Assoc. Professor of Engineering)
February 2-6 ENACT Immigration Justice Week
February 3 First day for undergraduates to elect pass/fail option for a class taken in the current term.
February 5 Deadline to apply for the Delta Summer Research Institute
February 11 First day to apply for spring graduation.
March 2 Last day to apply for spring graduation.
March 10 Last day for undergraduates to elect a pass/fail option for the current term and to request a "P" grade for the preceding term (at 5 p.m.)
March 30 Last day to drop semester courses. Last day to request a medical underload.

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