Legal Studies minor

[Carrapicho]

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/87859/

I would submit this as a correction but I have a feeling it would be rejected because it's not really "new" information, just more information than Adelaide provided. The Legal Studies minor was first offered in Fall 2014, which is when the Political Science Department released an overhaul of its major requirements. As part of this overhaul, the department began offering three new minors as well: Legal Studies, International Strategy and Diplomacy, and Political Strategy. These same minors correlate to three of the five new professional tracks (like emphases but the university won't allow them to be called that for reasons we won't get into here), so you can't major in Political Science and have one of these minors--you would instead do the corresponding professional track in the major. The two other professional tracks are Global Development and Research & Analysis. The minors all have relatively small enrollments right now but that's probably because the word is still getting out that they exist. Sorry you missed out, Jealous recent graduate!

[Violet]

If you're willing to get into it, I'm interested in why the professional tracks can't be called emphases. In my major, they were emphases, so I'm wondering what the different requirements for the name are.

[Carrapicho]

Basically, it's all red tape at the university level. An emphasis is considered a separate major/program, at least in terms of how it is seen by the university, so to call something an emphasis requires board approval, including an explanation of how resources are allocated for the new program. The current university administration has refused to bring any new emphases proposals to the board for reasons unknown to us lower down on the totem pole. This means that any current major that wants to implement emphases has to call them tracks instead. It's annoying, because tracks don't show up on a college transcript like emphases do.

[Violet]

That's especially interesting given that my particular emphasis had application limited tracks. Sorry it sucks for transcript purposes.