To promote interdisciplinary education and encourage flexibility for students, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recently created and approved a track in Integrated Studies within the Individually Structured Major (ISM) to begin in fall 2016. The ISM is a long-standing program in CLAS that allows students to work with faculty advisors across departments to design their own unique course of study by drawing from courses across campus that fall into a coherent theme.

The ISM program plan requires courses from two or three disciplines with a minimum of 15 semester hours in each. A maximum of one discipline may be outside of CLAS. The program plan must be approved before one-third of the ISM course work is completed. This last requirement precluded students who had accumulated significant numbers of credits from pursuing the ISM.

The new Integrated Studies track within the ISM better fits students who have lots of credit hours, but have not met the requirements of a departmental major. The Integrated Studies major is a combination of two course clusters, one of which must be based on a CLAS minor. The other may be based on a minor in the catalog from any school or college, or can be constructed from a group of courses from a variety of disciplines as long as they form a coherent theme. Students who declare the major will take an introduction to interdisciplinary studies course and complete a capstone course and project that integrates the two clusters. The possibilities are endless. To declare Integrated Studies a student must have completed at least 60 credit hours. Anyone interested in learning more is encouraged to contact clas_advising@ucdenver.edu.