Information and Policies
Introduction
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) majors develop a deep understanding of how race and other modalities of power have structured human life in the past and the present. Students acquire an understanding of the historical production of race and ethnicity in the United States and across the globe. They learn how the contours of race and racism have changed over time and, concomitantly, how individuals and groups have experienced these phenomena in constantly morphing ways. Students examine present-day racial/ethnic ideologies such as multiculturalism, colorblindness, and postracialism as well as contemporary social phenomena such as changing working conditions, new migration patterns, and emergent cultural expressions. Students also explore the ways that race and ethnicity have developed in concert with gender, sexuality, class, indigeneity, citizenship, and other modalities of power and lived identity.
CRES majors make critical use of methods and concepts from different academic disciplines as a means of better understanding historical and contemporary social phenomena and problems. In the process, they learn to recognize both the limits and the value of established knowledge production practices. The configuration of the major allows students flexibility at the upper division to design a course of study that enables a general understanding of a range of issues of intellectual and professional interest and/or a deeper understanding of a key area of focus. Students may craft an elective distribution from several areas of specific research and career interests. Or, they may wish to take a number of elective courses in a particular area to develop expertise in it. For example, they may wish to focus on a social group (e.g., members of the African Diaspora), on a discipline (e.g., history), on a social phenomenon (e.g., social movements), or on a methodological or theoretical orientation (e.g., theories of race, gender and sexuality).
Through their immersion in a program of study that is multidisciplinary, comparative, and transnational in scope, CRES majors develop a critical, situated perspective on the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of being a citizen of the United States or residing in its borders in the 21st century. CRES also helps students develop skills in critical thinking, comparative analysis, the application of social theory, research, communication, and writing so that they can act effectively in an ever-changing, complicated, and culturally diverse world.
Academic Advising for the Program
Email: cres@ucsc.edu
Phone: (831) 459-2757
CRES advising is held in Humanities 1, room 416. Drop in hours are posted on the CRES website. Students can make an appointment by using the Slug Success application found under Resources in their student portal (MyUCSC).
Transfer students should consult the Transfer Student Information and Policy section for specific requirements.
Getting Started in the Major
Students interested in the CRES major do not need preparation to start in the major, but must be enrolled in or have completed CRES 10 to declare the major. (Please see the section "How to Declare a Major" for details.) All requirements of the major can be completed within two years.
Program Learning Outcomes
Students who complete the CRES major should emerge with the following skills, competencies, and knowledge:
Critical Frameworks
- Demonstrate deep knowledge of historical, contemporary, and intersectional perspectives on race and ethnicity.
- Demonstrate familiarity with different disciplinary methods applied to race and ethnicity.
- Demonstrate a critical perspective on institutional power and knowledge.
Communication
- Demonstrate ability to account for other people’s arguments, to formulate one’s own arguments, and to locate both arguments in the larger context of the field.
- Demonstrate ability to formulate an argument in alternative media, such as speech, audiovisual, digital, and other forms of non-written communication.
- Demonstrate writing effectively in the interdisciplinary field.
Research
- Demonstrate ability to design and implement a collaborative research project.
- Demonstrate ability to design and implement an independent research project.
Community Collaboration, Engagement, and Activism
- Demonstrate an understanding of the issues, ethics, and methods surrounding activist, collaborative, and community-based research projects.
- Demonstrate an understanding of collaborative knowledge that effectively integrates theoretical and experiential thinking about social justice.
Major Qualification Policy and Declaration Process
Major Qualification
Students must be enrolled in or have completed CRES 10, with a C or better, in order to declare the major. Transfer students should consult the Transfer and Information Policy section below.
Appeal Process
A student may file an appeal with the CRES adviser within 15 days of the denial of major declaration. The CRES program will notify the student and the college of the decision within 15 days of the receipt of the appeal.
How to Declare a Major
Students may declare the major by submitting a proposed Petition for Major/Minor Declaration to the program adviser. The major declaration should include a plan to complete CRES 100 and CRES 101 at the next possible opportunity.
Per campus policy, students must submit their major declaration no later than the third quarter of their sophomore year or, in the case of transfer students, no later than the second quarter of their junior year. CRES welcomes students to declare after this time frame who are pursuing more than one major or who are transferring from another major.
Transfer Information and Policy
Transfer Admission Screening Policy
Students planning to apply in this major are not required to complete specific major preparation courses for consideration of admission to UC Santa Cruz.
Getting Started at UCSC as a Transfer Student
Students must be enrolled in or have completed CRES 10, with a C or better, in order to declare the major. Transfer students and students in exceptional circumstances may substitute an equivalent course with the program director’s or undergraduate director’s approval.
Letter Grade Policy
This program does not have a letter grade policy.
Course Substitution Policy
CRES is an interdisciplinary major that includes courses taught by faculty in other departments (see the Electives section below for a list of approved courses). Students who wish to substitute a course not on the electives list should complete the Petition for Course Credit form available on the CRES website and submit the completed form to CRES advising.
Double Majors and Major/Minor Combinations Policy
The CRES major works very well as a double major with fields of study such as community studies, feminist studies, education, legal studies, literature, politics, and more.
Honors
CRES awards honors and highest honors in the major. At the end of each quarter, a faculty committee meets to review graduating student files. Students are considered for honors and highest honors based on their cumulative GPA, calculated from grades earned in coursework and the senior exit requirement undertaken for completion of the major. For honors, students must earn a minimum GPA of 3.70 in the relevant courses, while for highest honors, the GPA must be 3.90 or higher. Writing a thesis is not a requirement for receiving honors or highest honors.
Requirements and Planners
Course Requirements
To graduate with a major in CRES, a student is required to complete 10 courses with the approval of the program.
Lower-Division Courses
One lower-division foundation course:
CRES10 | Critical Race and Ethnic Studies: An Introduction | 5 |
Upper-Division Courses
Two upper-division courses are required for the major:
CRES100 | Comparative Theories of Race and Ethnicity | 5 |
CRES101 | Research Methods and Writing in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | 5 |
Students may petition to substitute a department-based, community-engagement course or social-movements course for CRES 101.
Electives
Students must complete at least six upper-division electives offered in critical race and ethnic studies (with the CRES designation) or from the lists below. For current offerings, please visit the CRES course page.
- At least two electives must be from the list of designated courses focusing on phenomena outside of the U.S. or on transnational or hemispheric subjects.
- At least two academic divisions must be represented in the elective coursework.
Students are encouraged to supplement their upper-division coursework with language study, internships, and individual or group independent studies. Students may petition to have up to 10 credits of such activities substituted for upper-division elective requirements, so long as these activities serve, or do not interfere with, the breadth requirements.
Arts
FILM165B | Race on Screen | 5 |
FILM165D | Asian Americans and Media | 5 |
FILM165E | Chicana/o Cinema, Video | 5 |
HAVC140A | America in Art | 5 |
HAVC140B | Victorian America | 5 |
HAVC140C | Race and American Visual Arts | 5 |
HAVC140D | Chicano/Chicana Art: 1970-Present | 5 |
HAVC141B | Death, Desire, and Modernity | 5 |
HAVC141F | The Camera and the Body | 5 |
HAVC141K | Activist Art Since 1960: Art, Technology, Activism | 5 |
HAVC142 | Contemporary Art and Ecology | 5 |
HAVC190J | Visual Cultures of the Vietnam-American War | 5 |
HAVC191B | The Virgin of Guadalupe: Images and Symbolism in Spain, Mexico, and the U.S | 5 |
HAVC191C | Subalternatives: Representing Others | 5 |
HAVC191E | Feminist Theory and Art Production | 5 |
HAVC191K | Decolonial Visual Culture | 5 |
Humanities
FMST123 | Feminism and Cultural Production | 5 |
FMST124 | Technology, Science, and Race Across the Americas | 5 |
FMST126 | Images, Power, and Politics: Methods in Visual and Textual Analysis | 5 |
FMST131 | The Politics of Matter and the Matter of Politics | 5 |
FMST139 | African American Women's History | 5 |
FMST145 | Racial and Gender Formations in the U.S | 5 |
HIS104C | Celluloid Natives: American Indian History on Film | 5 |
HIS104D | Museums and the Representation of Native American History, Memory, and Culture | 5 |
HIS106B | Asian and Asian American History, 1941-Present | 5 |
HIS109A | Race, Gender, and Power in the Antebellum South | 5 |
HIS110D | The Civil War Era | 5 |
HIS110H | Greater Reconstruction: Race, Empire, and Citizenship in the Post-Civil War United States | 5 |
HIS111 | Popular Conceptions of Race in U.S. History, 1600-Present | 5 |
HIS116A | Unchained Memory: Slavery and the Politics of the Past | 5 |
HIS120 | W.E.B. Du Bois | 5 |
HIS121A | African American History to 1877 | 5 |
HIS121B | African American History: 1877 to the Present | 5 |
HIS122A | Jazz and United States Cultural History, 1900-1945 | 5 |
HIS122B | Jazz and United States Cultural History, 1945 to the Present | 5 |
HIS123 | Immigrants and Immigration in U.S. History | 5 |
HIS124 | American Empire | 5 |
HIS125 | California History | 5 |
HIS125A | Indigenous Histories of California | 5 |
HIS128 | Chicana/Chicano History | 5 |
HIS145 | Gender, Colonialism, and Third-World Feminisms | 5 |
HIS150E | History and Memory in the Okinawan Islands | 5 |
HIS151A | Medicine and the Body in the Colonial World | 5 |
HIS158A | The Escapes of David George: Biographical Research on Slavery and Early America | 5 |
HIS170C | From the Trenches to the Casbah: France and its Empire in the 20th Century | 5 |
HIS177A | Slaves, Soldiers, and Scientists: History of the Tropics | 5 |
HIS184B | Racism and Antiracism in Europe: From 1870 to the Present | 5 |
HIS190D | Asian and Latino Immigration Since 1875 | 5 |
HIS190X | History of the Atlantic World, 1492-1824 | 5 |
HIS190Y | The Atlantic Slave Trade | 5 |
HIS194I | U.S. Bases and Social Movements in Asia | 5 |
HIS194T | Worlds of Labor in Asia | 5 |
HISC117
/CRES 117
| Making the Refugee Century: Non-Citizens and Modernity | 5 |
LIT102 | Translation Theory | 5 |
LIT121L | Green Ache: Ecopoetics, Race, and Material | 5 |
LIT125H | Modern Arabic Novel | 5 |
LIT133H | Haunted by the Forgotten War: Literature and Film of the Korean War | 5 |
LIT134A | Caribbean Literature | 5 |
LIT135F | Empire and After in the Anglophone Novel | 5 |
LIT135G | Postcolonial Writing | 5 |
LIT138A | Culture and Nation | 5 |
LIT138B | Regions in American Literature | 5 |
LIT145A | Colonial American Literatures | 5 |
LIT146D | Nineteenth-Century American Fiction | 5 |
LIT147A | Twain, Slavery, and the Literary Imagination | 5 |
LIT149B | Contemporary American Literature | 5 |
LIT149E | Modern Fiction and Poetry | 5 |
LIT160E | Theorizing Race and Comics | 5 |
LIT160I | Race, Militarism, and Empire in Asia and the Pacific | 5 |
LIT160K | Race, Labor, and Migration | 5 |
LIT161A | African American Literature | 5 |
LIT161B | African American Women Writers | 5 |
LIT162A | Asian American Literature | 5 |
LIT163A | American Indian Literature | 5 |
LIT164A | Jewish Travel Narratives | 5 |
LIT164D | Jewish Diaspora, Ethnicity, and Urban Life | 5 |
LIT164J | Jewish Writers and the American City | 5 |
LIT165B | Latino Fictions of the Americas | 5 |
LIT168A | The Culture of Islamic Law | 5 |
LIT169A | White Flow(n): Race, Gender, and Material | 5 |
LIT182I | Littérature d'expression française hors de France | 5 |
LIT183P | Fremdenangst: Ausländerfeindlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur und Kultur | 5 |
LIT189F | Literaturas Latinas en los Estados Unidos: en inglés, español y Spanglish | 5 |
LIT190Y | Topics in Jewish Literature and Culture | 5 |
Social Sciences
ANTH110L | Decolonizing Methodologies | 5 |
ANTH110Q
/CRES 110Q/FMST 110Q
| Queer Sexuality in Black Popular Culture | 5 |
ANTH130O | Native Feminisms, Gender, and Settler Colonialism | 5 |
ANTH131 | Gender in Cross-Cultural Context | 5 |
ANTH149 | Anthropology of Activism | 5 |
ANTH158 | Feminist Ethnographies | 5 |
ANTH187 | Cultural Heritage in Colonial Contexts | 5 |
ANTH196J | Imagining America | 5 |
CMMU101 | Communities, Social Movements, and the Third Sector | 5 |
CMMU145 | Global Capitalism: a History of the Present | 5 |
CMMU163 | Health Care Inequalities | 5 |
ECON128
/LGST 128
| Poverty and Public Policy | 5 |
EDUC104 | Ethical Issues and Teaching | 5 |
EDUC125 | Multicultural Children's Literature for Elementary Classrooms | 5 |
EDUC128 | Immigrants and Education | 5 |
EDUC141 | Bilingualism and Schooling | 5 |
EDUC160 | Issues in Educational Reform | 5 |
EDUC164 | Urban Education | 5 |
EDUC173 | Seminar in Critical Pedagogy | 5 |
EDUC177 | Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students Math and Science | 5 |
EDUC181 | Race, Class, and Culture in Education | 5 |
LALS112 | Immigration and Assimilation | 5 |
LALS128
/OAKS 128
| Latino Media in the U.S | 5 |
LALS131 | Latino Literatures: Assimilation and Assimilability | 5 |
LALS143 | Race and Ethnicity | 5 |
LALS144 | Mexicana/Chicana Histories | 5 |
LALS180 | Borders: Real and Imagined | 5 |
LGST111B
/POLI 111B
| Civil Liberties | 5 |
LGST135 | Native Peoples Law | 5 |
POLI110
/LGST 110
| Law and Social Issues | 5 |
PSYC153 | The Psychology of Poverty and Social Class | 5 |
PSYC155 | Social-Community Psychology in Practice | 5 |
PSYC159H | Community-Based Interventions | 5 |
PSYC159I | Psychology of Immigration | 5 |
SOCY120 | Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Sexuality and Cultural Politics | 5 |
SOCY121 | Sociology of Health and Medicine | 5 |
SOCY123
/LGST 123
| Law, Crime, and Social Justice | 5 |
SOCY126 | Sex and Sexuality as Social Practice and Representation | 5 |
SOCY128C
/LGST 128C
| Social History of Democracy, Anarchism, and Indigenism | 5 |
SOCY128I
/LGST 128I
| Race and Law | 5 |
SOCY132 | Sociology of Science and Technology | 5 |
SOCY133 | Currents in African American Cultural Politics | 5 |
SOCY139T | Community-Engaged Research Practicum | 5 |
SOCY145 | Sociology of Masculinities | 5 |
SOCY148 | Educational Inequality | 5 |
SOCY152 | Body and Society | 5 |
SOCY156 | U.S. Latinx Identities: Centers and Margins | 5 |
SOCY168 | Social Justice | 5 |
SOCY169 | Social Inequality | 5 |
SOCY170 | Ethnicity and Race | 5 |
SOCY171 | Exploring Global Inequality | 5 |
SOCY172 | Sociology of Social Movements | 5 |
SOCY173X | Water and Sanitation Justice | 5 |
SOCY174 | Twenty-First-Century African American Social Structure | 5 |
Transnational Requirement
Students must select at least two electives focusing on phenomena outside of the U.S. or on transnational or hemispheric subjects.
Division of the Arts
HAVC110 | Visual Cultures of West Africa | 5 |
HAVC111 | Visual Cultures of Central Africa | 5 |
HAVC115 | Gender in African Visual Culture | 5 |
HAVC116 | African Architecture | 5 |
HAVC117 | Contemporary Art of Africa | 5 |
HAVC118 | Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora | 5 |
HAVC119 | Arts and Politics of African Urban Space | 5 |
HAVC123A | Modernity and the Arts of India | 5 |
HAVC124B | History of Photography in Southeast Asia | 5 |
HAVC162A | Advanced Studies in Early Indigenous American Visual Culture: The Ancient Maya | 5 |
HAVC163 | The Native in Colonial Spanish America | 5 |
HAVC170 | Art of the Body in Oceania | 5 |
HAVC172 | Textile Traditions of Oceania | 5 |
HAVC179 | Topics in Oceanic Visual Culture | 5 |
HAVC190O | Berlin: History and the Built Environment | 5 |
HAVC190W | Art and Culture Contact in Oceania | 5 |
HAVC190X | Art and Identity in Oceania | 5 |
Division of the Humanities
FMST112
/POLI 112
| Women and the Law | 5 |
FMST115 | Gender, Sexuality, and Transnational Migration Across the Americas | 5 |
HIS101C | Oceans in World History | 5 |
HIS106A | Vietnam War Memories | 5 |
HIS110A | Colonial America, 1500-1750 | 5 |
HIS116 | Slavery Across the Americas | 5 |
HIS126 | From Indigenous Colonial Borderlands to the U.S.-Mexico Border | 5 |
HIS130 | History of Modern Cuba | 5 |
HIS134A | Colonial Mexico | 5 |
HIS134B | History of Mexico, 1850 to Present | 5 |
HIS137A | Africa to 1800 | 5 |
HIS137B | Africa from 1800 to the Present | 5 |
HIS137C | African Cinema | 5 |
HIS140D | Recent Chinese History | 5 |
HIS150C | Inventing Modern Japan: The State and the People | 5 |
HIS155 | History of Modern Israel | 5 |
HIS156 | Interrogating Politics in the Post-Colonial Middle East | 5 |
HIS157 | The Ottoman Empire | 5 |
HIS158C
/ANTH 179
| Slavery in the Atlantic World: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives | 5 |
HIS166 | Northern Ireland: Communities in Conflict | 5 |
HIS178E | Modern Jewish Intellectual History | 5 |
HIS181B | Africa and Britain in an Imperial World | 5 |
HIS185I | Latin American Jewish History in the Modern Period | 5 |
HIS185J | The Modern Jewish Experience | 5 |
HIS190A | Slavery and Race in Latin America | 5 |
HIS190B | Race and the Nation in Latin America | 5 |
HIS190N | Topics in African History | 5 |
HIS194U | The Cold War and East Asia | 5 |
HIS196N | Eastern European Jewish Social History | 5 |
LIT131C | Worldings | 5 |
LIT133F | Pacific Rim Discourse | 5 |
LIT133G | The Nuclear Pacific | 5 |
LIT133I | Global Japan: Literatures of the Japanese Diaspora | 5 |
LIT135A | Topics in African Literature | 5 |
LIT137A | Global Cities | 5 |
LIT149F | Contemporary Mexican Narrative | 5 |
LIT155A | Cinema and Subjectivity | 5 |
LIT155E | Cinema and Social Change in Latin America | 5 |
LIT160J | Exile, Diaspora, Migration | 5 |
LIT162B | Literature of the Asian Diaspora | 5 |
LIT164C | Global Jewish Writing | 5 |
LIT164G | Literature and the Holocaust | 5 |
LIT164H | Jewish Writers and the European City | 5 |
LIT165A | Chicano/Mexicano Geographies | 5 |
LIT165C | Mesoamerican Indigenous/Indigenista Literature | 5 |
LIT189A | De la conquista a Sor Juana | 5 |
LIT189E | Cuba | 5 |
LIT189H | La Globalizacion en/del Cine Latin/o Americano | 5 |
LIT189L | Poesía latinoamericana | 5 |
LIT189M | Prosa contemporánea hispanoamericana | 5 |
LIT189N | Latinoamericano testimonio | 5 |
LIT189O | El Cuento Hispanoamericano: Variedades esteticas de la literatura breve en America Latina | 5 |
LIT189P | Las mujeres en la literatura latinoamericana | 5 |
LIT189Q | Ficción y marginalidad | 5 |
LIT189S | La cultura popular en la narrativa latinoamericana | 5 |
LIT189T | Historia de la lectura y los lectores: Recepcion y consumo cultural en el mundo Latino Americano | 5 |
LIT189U | Modernidad y literatura: El Boom de la novela latinoamericana | 5 |
LIT189V | Andean Indigenismo | 5 |
LIT190O | Studies in Slavery, Race, and Nation in the Americas | 5 |
Division of the Social Sciences
ANTH110O
/HIS 181A
| Postcolonial Britain and France | 5 |
ANTH110P | India and Indian Diaspora through Film | 5 |
ANTH129 | Beyond Borders: Other Globalizations and Histories of Interconnection | 5 |
ANTH130A | Anthropology of Africa. | 5 |
ANTH130C | Politics and Culture in China | 5 |
ANTH130F
/CRES 130
| Blackness In Motion: Anthology of the African Diasporas | 5 |
ANTH130I | Cultures of India | 5 |
ANTH130L | Ethnographies of Latin America | 5 |
ANTH130T | Religion and Politics in the Muslim World | 5 |
ANTH159 | Race and Anthropology | 5 |
ANTH194X | Women in Politics: A Third World Perspective | 5 |
EDUC170 | East Asian Schooling and Immigration | 5 |
EDUC171 | South and Southeast Asian Schooling and Immigration | 5 |
LALS100 | Concepts and Theories in Latin American and Latina/o Studies | 5 |
LALS115 | Mexico-United States Migration | 5 |
LALS127 | Genero, Nacion Y Modernidad En El Cine | 5 |
LALS145 | Grassroots Social Change in Latin America | 5 |
LALS150 | Afro-Latinos/as: Social, Cultural, and Political Dimensions | 5 |
LALS152 | Consumer Cultures Between the Americas | 5 |
LALS165 | Contemporary Peru | 5 |
LALS170 | Indigenous Struggles in the Americas | 5 |
LALS171 | Brazil in Black and White | 5 |
LALS172 | Visualizing Human Rights | 5 |
LALS175 | Migration, Gender, and Health | 5 |
LALS178 | Gender, Transnationalism, and Globalization | 5 |
LALS194H | Central America and the United States | 5 |
POLI140C | Latin American Politics | 5 |
SOCY128
/LGST 126
| Law and Politics in Contemporary Japan and East Asian Societies | 5 |
SOCY128M
/LGST 128M
| International Law and Global Justice | 5 |
Disciplinary Communication (DC) Requirement
Students of every major must satisfy that major’s upper-division disciplinary communication (DC) requirement. The DC requirement in CRES is satisfied by completing one of the following courses:
Comprehensive Requirement
One of the following courses:
Planners
Four-Year Sample Academic Plan For CRES Major (Frosh)
Students must have satisfied the English language and writing requirement (ELWR) and have completed the C1 requirement in order to enroll in CRES 10. Students who place into C2 in their first fall quarter may enroll in CRES 10 in their first fall quarter.
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Fall |
Winter |
Spring |
1st (frosh) |
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2nd (soph) |
CRES 10 |
CRES 100 |
CRES 101 |
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CRES elective |
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3rd (junior) |
CRES elective |
CRES elective |
CRES elective |
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CRES elective |
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4th (senior) |
CRES elective |
CRES 190 |
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Students must also complete all general education requirements except for ER, which is satisfied by CRES 10.
Two-Year Sample Academic Plan for CRES Major (Transfer Students)
Transfer students should complete their general education (GE) requirements or IGETC before enrolling at UCSC, but this is not a requirement to complete the major within two years of transferring. The CRES major consists of 10 courses, allowing transfer students to complete about two CRES courses per quarter along with additional units to complete the required 180 units for graduation.
Sample Transfer-Students Academic Planner for CRES Major – Fall Admission
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Fall |
Winter |
Spring |
1st (junior) |
CRES 10 |
CRES 100 |
CRES 101 |
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CRES elective |
CRES elective |
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2nd (senior) |
CRES elective |
CRES elective |
CRES 190 |
CRES elective |
CRES elective |
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