Waterloo students from any faculty are welcome to live at St. Jerome’s and belong to our tight-knit community, but our academic departments specialize in the Arts. At SJU, Arts students benefit from the wide range of course offerings and resources available at a large, world-class university like UW, while also getting to experience the comfortable community environment of a small liberal arts college. Arts co-registration means smaller class sizes that encourage discussion with classmates and professors, and individual attention from staff and faculty, all while earning a University of Waterloo degree. Our classrooms are designed to facilitate discussion and sharing ideas, enriching the learning experience. The lively debates and impactful discussions I’ve had in SJU classrooms have been deeply formative experiences that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Whether you’re thinking of majoring in an Arts discipline like Sexuality, Marriage and Family Studies (SMF) or English and taking all of your courses here, or you’re looking for an elective to expand your mind and add some excitement to your STEM-focused class schedule, SJ is hands-down the best place at UW to take Arts classes. So which SJU Arts course is right for you? It’s time to find out!

Interested in perusing the Arts course offerings? I’ll get you started with a few that I think are particularly interesting:

This intersection of legal studies and psychology dives into the basic approaches to criminal profiling through case studies. If you're interested in criminal law or forensic psychology, this is the course for you!

Tuesdays with Toni are an unforgettable staple of the Arts experience for so many SJU students. Professor Toni Serafini will take you through theories of psychology from Freud to Skinner to Jung - and she'll do it with unmatched energy!

BJ Rye's infamous SMF 204 is truly an interdisciplinary course - you'll get a smattering of biology, psychology, sociology and law, all of which will help you to understand how human sexuality is constructed.

Interested in counselling? SMF 208 is the first in a collection of four courses that make up the SMF counselling specialization. In SMF 208, you'll have the opportunity to learn about anti-oppressive and inclusionary therapeutic practices while critically analyzing the intersections of class, culture, dis/ability, gender and race.

What defines "normal"? What does it mean to "rebel"? You'll meet literary rebels and engage with these questions in ENGL 108F.

If you love philosophy, Lord of the Rings, or both, this is the course for you! You'll grapple with problems like the existence of God, fate, free will, evil, death and technology -- with HOBBITS!

The assigned readings and class discussions in RS 121 have a reputation for being incredibly engaging, but this is not a course for the light of heart. In "Evil", you'll confront challenging ideas about death, suffering and humanity from the perspectives of diverse world religions.

The Godfather, The Sopranos and Goodfellas are just a few of the assigned "readings" in ITALST 265. The goal of the course is to deconstruct the romanticized portrayal of the Italian and Italian-American gangster lifestyle created on visual media and television by analyzing the atrocities committed by organized crime.

If you’re looking for more, check out our course listings here and Tyler’s blog about Arts courses at SJU here.