Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Interdisciplinary Science and Practice (Co-op)

at Carleton University Canada

At Carleton University's Sprott School of Business, you will have exceptional opportunities to explore your interests and engage with key issues that are shaping business and communities. Sprott is a close-knit and inclusive community that offers a rich student experience and outstanding support, empowering students to find success and have a positive impact in the world.

Sprott’s Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) is a four-year business degree that delivers a complete business education with options to tailor your program to your individual interests and goals, including co-op.

Accounting - Concentration
Accountants are organizational leaders who provide key strategic counsel, in addition to ensuring financial information accurately reflects an organization’s financial position.

Prepare for careers in auditing, financial or management accounting, and taxation. Within the BCom program, you can complete all of the academic courses required to enter the Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) Professional Education Program. Co-op hours in an approved placement can be counted towards the practical experience requirements to become a CPA. 

The Environmental Science program brings together the study of biology, chemistry, earth sciences and geography to enable its graduates to address complex and multidisciplinary environmental and conservation problems. Through lecture and seminar courses, hands-on laboratory work and field camps, students become proficient in topics such as water resource management, fish and wildlife ecology, ecological restoration, sustainable resource extraction, environmental monitoring, and environmental policy. In the upper years, students take courses in chosen areas of study and hone their skills in preparing research and thesis projects, working in teams and individually on current problems facing environmental science.

Are you interested in global environmental issues like climate change? This specialization looks at global processes and their impact on the environment, focusing attention on the emergence of the environment as a key theme of globalization. You will have the opportunity to develop an integrated understanding of global environmental issues, processes, patterns and solutions, as well as a skill set for conducting a critical analysis of current approaches to these issues and methods to implement and effect change. You will examine global biophysical systems and human-environment interactions, and you can also choose areas of interest within the specialization (such as human geography, urban networks, global environmental politics, sustainability or environmental change).

Psychologists study the mechanisms that underlie our thoughts, emotions and behaviours. They examine a diverse range of topics, such as how we think and learn, how we interact with others and how we can promote healthy development and wellness. This is accomplished by conducting research so that the knowledge gained can help us to better understand the human mind, enhance well-being and performance, and generate additional research questions.

Cognitive science involves the study of cognition, perception, and emotion from a wide range of perspectives. Despite the many different methodologies they use, cognitive scientists are united in their interest in the mind—and the brain.

Researchers in our program (students and faculty members) study the mind by combining the methods and theories of five disciplines: psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience and computer science. This interdisciplinary approach allows unique insights into human understanding, thought, perception, language and emotion.

The Bachelor of Cognitive Science is offered as an Honours program with either a thesis or coursework option, and as a three year degree.

Anthropologists study human beings, globally and cross-culturally, and recognise that each way of life is but one possibility among many. In a pluralistic world, where people from different places and backgrounds frequently interact, anthropology is an important tool for helping us understand each other and the rapid changes going on around us. Anthropology offers the potential to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a person, to question what passes as “normal” or “natural”, and to examine the world we inhabit as interconnected by environmental, political, economic, cultural and social forces.

While anthropologists have traditionally studied in small scale, non-Western societies, today we apply our participatory research methods and a combination of humanistic and social scientific perspectives to all kinds of situations: if people do it, you can study it as an anthropologist.

Carleton’s anthropology program specializes in socio-cultural anthropology, which is the study of contemporary societies and cultures through direct engagement, participant-observation and other qualitative methods. Our faculty work in various contexts and communities in Alaska, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Thailand, the Andes, and Sub-Saharan Africa, among others. Our faculty specialize in a range of topics including:

• The study of Indigenous people’s lives in context (e.g. indigenous-state relations; governance & colonialism; language; urban indigenous communities).
• Environmental issues (e.g. human-environmental relations; subsistence politics; the Anthropocene; climate change; natural resources)
• Transnational & global issues (e.g. transnational adoption; development; migration; diaspora; sex tourism)
• Race, ethnicity, and nationalism (e.g. ethno-history; ethno-politics)
• Selfhood, personhood, subjectivity, identity, psychiatric anthropology, and phenomenology;
• Genders and sexualities (e.g. motherhood; reproductive health; gendered childhood; feminist theories/methodologies).
• Political economy (e.g. global capitalisms; processes of commodification; capitalist and non-capitalist societies)

Co-op
A co-operative education option is available to students registered in the B.A. Honours Anthropology program. Students in the B.A. Honours Anthropology program must successfully complete three work terms to obtain the co-op designation.

Economics may be a specialized area of knowledge, but it is relevant to almost every aspect of our lives. At its core, it is the study of reasoned choice in the context of scarce resources and competing interests. The need to make such choices pervades the day-to-day lives of all of us—as individuals and in society as a whole.

In Carleton’s Bachelor of Economics (BEcon), you will study the operation of market-based economies, examining the causes of economic growth, inflation, unemployment and international trade.

The Earth Sciences program at Carleton offers you the opportunity to study the Earth’s systems, incorporating knowledge from other sciences including physics, biology and chemistry. You will learn about processes (such as evolution, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics and mountain building, formation of hydrocarbon reservoirs and mineral deposits) influential in the Earth’s geologic past that establish our present and future global development. The program offers the opportunity to participate in hands-on field courses that can take you to sites throughout Ontario, across Canada and around the world.

The study of history allows us to recognize and understand the complex issues that shaped the contemporary world. The History Department offers courses in African, American, Asian, Canadian, Caribbean, European, Latin American and South Asian history. Some courses trace the history of social, political and cultural change of a region or period. Others are thematic and may examine women’s history, the histories of science, sexuality, food and drink, or slavery. In the Public History concentration, Honours students explore how history appears in our everyday lives, not just in museums and monuments, but also in movies, reality television, video games, music and the stories families and communities pass from one generation to the next.

In first year, history students may choose a small seminar class or a larger lecture course with a tutorial group. Both formats foster debate and discussion. All history courses encourage student research which may draw on the rich array of libraries and archives in the national capital, including Carleton’s own valuable collections and resources.

Media and communication technologies are engines of globalization, and shape the rapidly changing social, political, economic and cultural environments in which we live. Global media and communication affect how we access, share and exchange information, how we work, and how we see the world and our places in it. They transform relations between states and blur the boundaries (real and imagined) separating people and communities. In this specialization you will explore global media and communication in historical and contemporary contexts, drawing on a range of perspectives that will provide the knowledge and skills necessary for working in global and international settings as communicators, researchers, analysts or advocates.