These occasions have provided undergraduate and graduate students with invaluable pre-professional experience. The department begins and ends each academic year with a picnic that includes faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. We make a particularly strong effort to locate and include new students for the fall picnic. Pizzas and soft drinks are served on these occasions. Once students get beyond the large introductory courses, the average class size is around 35 students.
Faculty get to know, by name, members of their classes.
The fact that anthropology faculty win teaching awards is indicative that teaching is taken very seriously in this department. It is not an after-thought. Faculty in this department would not receive tenure unless excellence in the classroom is demonstrated. The department's priorities mesh nicely with a number of frequently-articulated goals of the College and University. First, arguably no greater demonstrable commitment to the internationalization of the curriculum per FTE is found anywhere else on this campus than in the Department of Anthropology.