IGESO

Interdisciplinary General Education (IGE)

IGE Class

Think Deeper. Connect Wider. Choose IGE

Discover big ideas in small, seminar-style classes that integrate knowledge and approaches from across the humanities, social sciences and a strong learning community. Dive into hands-on learning with creative projects and IGE Arts and Culture Events like museum visits, concerts, and plays. Build powerful skills in communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. IGE challenges you to ask sharper questions, question assumptions, and stand out in any field!

#21
Best Colleges in America
The Wall Street Journal

Mission

IGE provides an interdisciplinary undergraduate general education experience that prepares students to lead globally conscious, socially responsible, productive, satisfying, and ethical lives in a changing diverse world. 

Goals

Become Better through Diversity

IGE students and faculty reflect the diversity of ÁùÉ«Íø. Through active learning we seek to dissolve the boundaries that inhibit our ability to fully engage one another in order to become our most complete selves and foster the joyous exploration that is true learning.

Foster Growth Through Community

Provide a supportive learning community as well as a stimulating intellectual environment for each participant’s academic, civic, and personal growth.

Build A Culture of Student-Centered Coll

Contribute to the ongoing development and practice of creative learner-based pedagogies and interdisciplinary curricula that integrate collaborative teaching, learning, service, and research.

Advance General Education

Exercise leadership on campus and as a peer model in academe to create more meaningful general education experiences and contribute to the ongoing development of liberal arts education.

Why Students Love IGE?


The interactive and collaborative nature of all IGE classes creates a safe space where you develop knowledge and relationships with your instructors and community of peers in smaller classes.

Graded on reading, writing, research, projects, and participation.

Learn through discussions, projects, and hands-on activities that embody Cal Poly’s learn-by-doing ethic.

Participate in Arts Events. Attend theater performances and visit museums and music concerts that enhance your sense of community, belonging and arts appreciation. 

IGE prompts you to consistently connect new knowledge with your own lives and diverse communities to ensure that what you are learning informs how you see and act in the world. 

IGE’s speaking, writing, and collaboration-intensive courses develop the transferable skills that employers seek in today’s economy and that prepare you to be active, informed, ethical citizens.  

Instead of focusing on one discipline (like history or English Composition), IGE courses are each designed around a theme important to your life, such as: What makes us who we are? (IGE 1100), Faith and Authority (IGE 1200), Industrialization, Globalization, and Sustainability (IGE 2150), Othering (IGE 2250), and the Power of Empires (IGE 2350).