Anthropology, the study of who we are as human beings and how we came to be that way, is one of the few fields to combine fascinating coursework and practical career training in one academic package. More than 300 colleges and universities in the U.S., including Texas A&M University, offer a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology. An undergraduate major in anthropology not only provides a sound Liberal Arts education but also gives students a needed edge in today's fiercely competitive job market. A B.A. in anthropology lays an excellent foundation for further work in teaching, government, business, medicine and law.

As a major, you will take courses that look at our species from biological and cultural perspectives. You will learn about our primate heritage and the animal underpinnings of the human family's reliance on culture to transmit knowledge across generations. You will glimpse the potent forces that have shaped our kind through 70 million years of primate evolution.

As an anthropology student, you will be encouraged to see the world holistically, as the sum of its biological, social, and cultural parts. Holism — an eye toward the all-encompassing "Big Picture" — is what distinguishes anthropology from more technical and specialized fields such as marketing, finance, economics, math, and other majors that view the world through narrower lenses. At each step toward your B.A. degree you will be urged to bring a holistic viewpoint to bear in projects and research papers in the major's four subfields: cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropologies and archaeology.

Anthropology's focus on comprehensive breadth is especially valuable to men and women seeking careers in corporate America in realms of strategic planning, decision-making, and programs management. Anthropology's scope and intellectual roominess can prepare students to make objective, farsighted decisions at the professional level in any career field.

Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can people of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together? Moreover, your training in anthropology will help sensitize you to the mosaic of ethnic differences found on our planet. You will study the world's societies - groups from the Pacific, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, as well as our own nation's Hispanic, Laotian, Japanese, Native American, African-American, and other ethnic minority groups. Exposure to inter-ethnic ways of thinking and feeling will help you to understand the diverse contending motivations at work in today's global economy.

To the career-minded student, few concepts are as useful, at all levels of the corporate pyramid, as the anthropological concept of culture. Understand the inner assumptions and unvoiced axioms of the people you work with - glimpse the world as their culture teaches them to picture it - and you will be able to communicate across class lines and ethnic boundaries as if you had a natural gift for bridging communication gaps. In addition, recent anthropological studies of "corporate culture" have revealed how power is actually wielded and symbolized and how decisions are made inside and outside the official board rooms of America's own companies, enabling us to see beneath the flattering portraits shown in annual reports.