Areas of Study

At Bennington you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.

We have designed our curriculum to create multiple points of entry and to highlight connections between courses—all in the effort to help you design a course of study and work that supports your Plan in the most meaningful ways. About half of all courses are new term-to-term, and intensive “pop-up” mini-courses are proposed by students or faculty who want to investigate issues as they are unfolding. Just as your Plan is responsive to each new curricular and field experience, the Bennington curriculum flexes to include courses driven by what is engaging faculty and students now, in the world and in their own practice as writers and artists and scientists and scholars.