Bachelor of Arts in Latin American and Iberian Studies

at Shorelight Group - University of Massachusetts - Boston USA

The human services field continues to be one of the fastest-growing in Massachusetts and the nation. Human service providers work in diverse settings, from state agencies to nonprofit organizations. Within these settings they carry out different roles, including advocate, case manager, educator, mediator, and provider of support services for individuals, families, and groups.

The BA Program in Human Services at UMass Boston’s College of Liberal Arts (CLA) prepares students for purposeful careers in human services and graduate education. It provides a theoretical framework, and hands-on experience working with individuals, families, and their communities. In this major, students learn to see people and systems ecologically, envisioning the individual in constant interaction with his or her environment. We examine how individuals and small groups affect and are affected by larger systems, including those that are socioeconomic and political.

Our curriculum provides knowledge and skills that are essential for the delivery of human services, with an emphasis on direct service. We offer service-learning opportunities that allow students to engage in local communities, working on mutually defined issues for the purpose of using one’s education to make a difference.

The field of Africana Studies documents and disseminates a specialized body of knowledge about Africa, the Caribbean and especially the United States. We focus on the experiences of the African Diasporas – the global dispersion of peoples of African descent – its history, literature, culture, society, and contributions worldwide. Students are prepared for careers relevant to the development of the African world community and to the rectification of global social ills created by individual and institutional racism.  Students approach the field and subject matter from a rigorous curriculum rooted in the social and cultural history of Peoples of Africa and the Africa Diaspora, and designed to provide practical solutions to challenges facing them from both a local and global context.

The Information Technology major offered through UMass Boston's College of Management is designed to offer pathways to highly-demanded careers in IT for both high school graduates and students of Massachusetts community colleges. Our small classes ensure personalized attention from IT faculty while our ties to the Greater Boston business and technical communities add an extra dimension of learning to our program of business information technology education. The IT major offers an “applications-path” format for students which includes a core of technical knowledge (nine courses), an area of specialization or track within IT (four or five courses, depending on track selection), three professional electives in an application or domain area (preferably outside of IT but within business), and two wrap-up courses (project management and IT capstone), in addition to general education requirements.

The IT major is project-based.  Every exercise assigned throughout the BSIT is designed to be of the kind that a student might encounter in his or her work: collaboration, competence, and outcomes assessment are the hallmark characteristics of the program.  Students will learn how to use IT to solve real-world problems within the context of a field in which they wish to work. Graduates will be familiar with, and be able to apply, the following core information technologies to solve business problems:

• Programming
• Networking
• Databases
• Web technologies

Business Intelligence (BI) is the technology that companies such as Amazon.com and Google use to take advantage of the enormous amount of data they collect and analyze. It is the technology with which Amazon.com knows what book to recommend you every time you login, Google knows how to rank the pages you are searching for, and banks decide whether to approve loan applications almost instantly.

UMass Boston's MS in Business Analytics (MSBA) is a 10 course, 30 credit degree program. To receive the MSBA, students must complete a minimum of 10 courses: Analytical Core, MSBA Electives, and the MSBA Capstone. One (1) prerequisite course must be satisfied or waived through prior relevant coursework, based on a review of transcripts.*

The MSBA program is designed to prepare students for utilizing analytical techniques, methods, and applications for data-driven practices in diverse organizations and enterprises of all sizes.

As businesses become more and more reliant on data-driven strategies, the needs and opportunities for graduates in Business Analytics have grown rapidly. Breakthroughs in data collection, storage, and analysis to uncover and capture business value have fueled this growth, and post-recession companies have recognized this potential and increasingly emphasize data-driven decision-making in their business strategies. The current annual rate of job growth in this area is approximately 11.8%, a rate that is only expected to accelerate in the future.

This program covers theories of powerful techniques and quantitative methods in Business Analytics and how they are applied in the real world. The program focuses on using current software tools to study effective techniques of problem formulation, developing solutions with mathematical and algorithmic techniques, and methods for implementing those solutions with technology.

The MSBA program offers students a choice of two specializations, Big Data Analytics and Supply Chain Analytics. Each includes a core of analytical courses, elective courses in that specialization, and a capstone course.

Big Data Analytics
The Big Data Analytics specialization focuses on data mining and analytical techniques, big data management, storage, and modeling. The objectives consist of enabling students to process big data in an effective and efficient way, discover knowledge patterns in big data, build predictive models, and use big data to answer business questions.

The communication major is an 12-course program that focuses on the social and scientific study of human communication. The curriculum offers students the chance to explore coursework in interpersonal, mediated, political and health communication, among others. Our courses emphasize communication across a variety of channels diverse cultures.

The School for the Environment's nationally recognized Environmental Studies and Sustainability program emphasizes solutions integrating the humanities and social sciences with economics and business. As environmental and sustainability advocates, students customize their course of study, drawing from such diverse fields as anthropology, law, history, management, economics, and the sciences. In addition to coursework, this hands-on degree incorporates internships, research, cooperative education, and capstone course experiences in which students work as members of a multi-disciplinary team partnered with agencies and organizations throughout the Boston metropolitan area.

• Students will understand key sustainability concepts and become practiced at applying these principles to real world problems.
• Students will be able to use interdisciplinary and collaborative decision-making processes to devise practical solutions for managing environmental problems.
• Students will be able to analyze and critique sustainability issues balancing multiple disciplinary perspectives and research approaches (e.g., social, ecological, ethical, philosophical, political, and economic).
• Students will demonstrate analytical proficiencies, both quantitative and qualitative, to support data-driven decisions.
• Students will understand the system interactions and feedbacks between human activities and social institutions and the natural environment.
• Students will be experienced in communicating their learnings both in writing, visually, and orally, and for specific and general audiences.

Our goal as a program is to engage UMass Boston students actively with Anthropology's long-standing attention to issues of cultural diversity and to economic stability in both Western and non-Western regions combines with the discipline's holistic, evolutionary, deeply historical, critical, and cross-cultural approaches to offer students powerful resources for understanding current trends that affect their workplaces and their communities.

The first step in becoming an anthropology major is to enroll in Anthropology 105, 106, or 107. These courses provide an overview of the various subfields of anthropology, and all majors are required to take all three courses, although the order in which they are taken is up to the student. One of these courses, and in some cases all three, are prerequisites to nearly all upper-level anthropology courses.

The Computer Science Department offers a BA degree in Computer Science. It provides a similar education in the theory and practice of computer science with more of an emphasis on outside humanities. Either degree can be used as a basis for many jobs in industry or for graduate work in computer science and other fields. 

The field of Latin American and Iberian studies explores the languages, literatures, and histories of Spain, Portugal, Latin America and the Caribbean. Insight into these cultures trains students to think critically from different perspectives—an important skill in a world where communication and understanding across boundaries is essential. Latin American and Iberian studies graduates are prepared for careers in international affairs, government, education and many other fields.

Upon completion of the Major in Latin American and Iberian Studies, students will be able to:

• Communicate proficiently, using all four skills (i.e. speaking, listening, reading and writing), in academic, professional, and everyday settings in the language that is required by their selected track.1
• Conduct and disseminate academic research both orally and in writing in the language that is required by their selected track.
• Identify and analyze cultural representations of the languages, cultures and societies of the Latin American and Iberian world, both their own and those produced by others, in accordance with academic standards.
• Document data and formulate concrete research questions in order to conduct academic research at undergraduate level.
• Recognize and utilize appropriate methodologies in order to explicitly outline a research plan to conduct academic research at undergraduate level.
• Produce scholarly work in dialogue with academic fields such as anthropology, history, and geography at undergraduate level.
• Apply pre-professional translation skills to a variety of documents in both directions, Spanish to English and English to Spanish.2
• Assess a variety of theoretical approaches to Translation Studies in order to adopt adequate methodologies for the translation of a variety of documents.

UMass Boston's MBA is a streamlined 12-course, AACSB-accredited, immersive business program. focused on equipping you with the knowledge and skills you need to succeed as a business leader. The program is designed for professionals who want to gain a deeper understanding of the ever-changing business world to advance their career, change careers, or start their own business. Explore foundational business theories, gain experience with emerging technologies, and develop your analytical skills.