The American University of Paris, academic home to students from over one hundred different nationalities, is the most international liberal arts university in the world. A small, select, multilingual and multicultural learning community, the University is situated in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, just under the Eiffel Tower, and invites into its classrooms one of the most vibrant, diverse and beautiful cities in Europe. Learning opportunities abound for AUP students in the “City of Light.” Museum and library visits, internships, cultural events, connections with all measure of international and French institutions, study trips across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa make an AUP education both a distinctive and unforgettable experience.

At AUP, we believe fervently in the American pedagogical model of the liberal arts curriculum. This means that, in the Undergraduate Curriculum, you will take roughly a third of your courses in General Education, permitting you to develop language, writing, public speaking, quantitative and technological skills; to explore disciplines you may not have known or fields that you wish to sample; and to begin to uncover the ways in which disciplines overlap, producing intellectual synergies. FirstBridge, our first-year, discipline-based interdisciplinary learning communities program, is a distinctive feature of general education at AUP. Another third of your courses will be in the area of your major or specialty, in which a series of learning goals developed by your professors will be stepped so as to foster in you increasing familiarity with a single field and to help you produce increasingly autonomous work in it. Finally, the last third of your courses will be what we call electives, courses that you take to deepen or broaden your knowledge in ancillary fields, or other disciplines that attract your interest. You can use your electives to take sequences of courses on the same topic in different disciplines, or to accomplish a minor or second major. Some majors, such as International Business and Global Communications may strike a different balance, one requiring a higher number of courses within the major and consequent reduction of elective breadth, but both of these majors are also, by definition, deeply interdisciplinary.

The purpose of a liberal arts education is precisely to expose you to the big questions that only such a broad sampling of courses can provide. We think that you should come to AUP preparing to be changed by the transformative power of our liberal arts curriculum as much as by the demographic diversity of the students and scholars that make up our University community. An Academic Affairs team, a Student Affairs department, a Career Services office, and individual academic advisors help you find your own path within this flexible system, supporting your learning and career goals, and your personal development throughout your time at AUP. We guarantee that the unique combination of AUP’s liberal arts-based curriculum and the diversity that inflects it in each of our classrooms will leave you changed at the end of your four years at AUP.

AUP’s graduate programs all feature our distinctive, signature curriculum which marries traditional course work and practical, hands-on applications. In some programs, these are called modules or practicums; in others, they take the form of internships. AUP’s graduate programs have grown out of faculty research and the University’s curricular strengths, preparing tomorrow’s leaders to excel in domains of crucial importance to our world: sustainable development, immigration, energy and the environment, civil society development, humanitarian aid, public policy, global communications, and cultural policy.

The big picture, however, remains you—as a student within and amongst our liberal arts disciplines, our majors, our numerous minors, the internships, study trips, lectures, career events, film series, conversations and myriad daily encounters with the global city that is Paris. Most important of all is your increasing capacity for independent thought, for critical analysis, for an authentic voice, and for intercultural adeptness. Only a liberal arts curriculum can bring together what takes place inside and outside the classroom, producing students whose independence of mind, curiosity, and capacity to transfer knowledge from one domain to another will prepare them to be successful in any career they choose. Taking charge of your own lifelong education is what an AUP education empowers you to do.