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Special Committees The Cornell graduate system requires students to assemble individually-tailored “special committees” to direct their programs of study.
Graduate students must select at least two members of their three- (exceptionally four-) member committee from the S&TS field. The Chairperson must
be a faculty member of the S&TS graduate field. The remaining members are chosen from Cornell’s graduate faculty as a whole. This system allows
students to include faculty members from outside the field of S&TS on their committees, and thus introduces a degree of flexibility in the design of each student’s specific training and research program. In addition, faculty members in the S&TS graduate field provide
ties to other departments and programs through their own wider affiliations. Cemented through joint appointments and graduate field memberships,
these include History, Communication, Philosophy, Government, Sociology, Anthropology, Information Science, Environmental Engineering,
Peace Studies, Women’s Studies, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Human Development and Family Studies, and other areas of the social and
natural sciences. Members of the field thus provide students with a considerable range of disciplinary expertise and perspectives. The core faculty members of the graduate field are particularly noted for their work in the following areas: history and historiography of science and technology; technology and society; social study of contemporary
science and technology; engineering, environmental, and biomedical ethics; women in science; gender and technology; philosophy of science;
politics of science and technology; and communication and popularization of science. Much of this work necessarily is historical, sociological, and
political in the broadest sense, and it draws on the well-established traditions of expertise in such studies possessed by individual faculty members. In consultation with their faculty advisers, graduate students in S&TS take active responsibility for the development of their own academic programs within the overall disciplinary context of S&TS. Students are assigned a temporary chairperson, which is chosen by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) when they enter the S&TS graduate program. Before the end of the Fall semester of his or her first year, the student must form a temporary committee, consisting of a temporary advisor and two other members of the S&TS Field. The student will meet with this preliminary committee at the end of their first year, in an end-of-year progress meeting. After that meeting the student may reconstitute their committee, but must do so by the end of their third semester. |
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