anthropology is the study of your world
and human beings in it it's the most
powerful tool I think that we have to
study human beings in the past and in
the present and in the future as well
I'm Tsim Schneider I'm an archaeologist in
the Department of Anthropology here at
UC Santa Cruz and I want to tell you a
little bit about our program College
factual recently ranked the UCSC s
anthropology department as 13th out of
250 anthropology programs which includes
such places as Stanford University and
the University of Chicago so we're doing
pretty well within our anthropology
department we have faculty that
represent different subfields of the
program including archeology biological
anthropology and cultural anthropology
as well and because of these unique and
diverse faculty interests and
specialties we have a really solid
understanding and very diverse offering
of courses that focus in on different
aspects of cultures and human beings
around the world we can study indigenous
societies in California and their
responses to colonialism some
archeologists might be focusing in on
the gold rush era and shipwrecks other
faculty might be focusing in on ancient
DNA I am an environmental anthropologist
of China which means that
I'm interested in particular on how
ideas of environments are changing
politics and the way the Chinese
Communist Party works hi there my name
is Vicky Oelze and I'm assistant  professor
here in the anthropology department at
UCSC and I'm director of the primate
ecology and molecular anthropology lab
here in our department and what we
mainly do in my lab is reconstructing
the diets of African great apes
hi I'm Molly Segale undergraduate
advisor for the Department of
Anthropology
we offer a Bachelors of Arts in
anthropology and a minor in anthropology
students do not declare an emphasis or
concentration in our major but our major
and our minor incorporate the three
anthropological subfields of archaeology
biological and cultural anthropology our
students have amazing opportunities to
conduct hands-on research previous
majors have conducted independent
projects on using tattoos to measure
tissue shrinkage in different
mummification practices local rituals
around pour over coffee food access in
Oakland glass beads in Mission Santa
Cruz and prehensile tail use in
mantled howler monkeys
anthropology is for you students come
from an assortment of backgrounds and
they're pursuing research projects that
explore a variety of different aspects
of human beings around the world our
course offerings and the
community in general are inclusive and
far-reaching students often tell us that
this is the most welcoming and
supportive departments at UC Santa Cruz
anthropology is really about
telling stories and figuring out how we
can move forward with stories in a way
that lets us open our minds to new
possibilities and this past quarter I
took intro to medical anthropology and
it was really really cool it's looking
at medicine and medical practices and
just the idea of suffering through
different cultural lenses and it's
really really fascinating by talking to
different professors and taking
different courses you're you're trying
to it's a really good way of figuring
out what excites you the most you know
like the archives is how I was able to
get the skills to go you know work at
the Museum of Natural History which is
how I discovered that I love basketry I
would say my favorite class that I've
taken so far was probably lithic
technology I took
that last quarter and it's basically
just learning how to make stone tools
the way that early hominid species did
and how they used them and like why they
prefer different types of materials and
it's very like it gives you some really
good insight into how intelligent these
creatures were that we totally just pass
off as caveman
our students go on to medical school and
law school they become teachers social
workers and psychologists some live and
work abroad after graduation putting
their second language skills to use
others work with law enforcement or
hired at Silicon Valley tech companies
to study and improve corporate culture
because we teach our students critical
thinking and stress strong writing
skills our graduates are prepared for a
wide range of careers lots of people you
will recognize have been anthropology
majors so welcome to anthropology and we
look forward to meeting you
