Promoting diverse career paths

The recent YDN article on competitive majors may have inadvertently given some readers the impression that most EP&E majors are headed to graduate school and are not interested in the policy, business and service fields that attract people to some other majors (“Students weigh Global Affairs, EP&E,” Jan. 16). Many EP&E students do go to graduate school in a variety of fields. An even larger number of our graduating students, though, head into consulting and business, and many of our students also go to medical school, law school and a variety of other fields. We are proud of all of them.

The article also may have implied that EP&E might not be the major to go to if students have an international topic or are interested in working in international fields after graduation. In fact, EP&E students are deeply engaged with international topics, and do field research and write theses on subjects as diverse as freedom of speech in China, religious pluralism in the Middle East, and urban development in India and Brazil, as well as on many topics closer to home. Many students also work abroad — in environments as different as Hong Kong, Ghana and Vatican City — during their summer internships.

This breadth, flexibility and our major’s intellectual engagement with ethics, economics and the politics of the world around them gives all our students — including this year’s two Rhodes scholars and one Mitchell scholar — a world of options once they graduate.

Steven Wilkinson

Jan. 17

The writer is the director of undergraduate studies for the Ethics, Politics and Economics major. 

 

Open access at Yale Law School

Adi Kamdar (“Acting for Aaron and open access,” Jan. 15) ably makes the case for open-access scholarship at Yale. It should be pointed out, however, that Yale is not completely lacking in free online institutional repositories.  The Law School is very supportive of open access, and the Law Library has since 2003 maintained the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, which preserves and makes accessible the scholarship of the school.

Currently there are more than 4,000 faculty papers in our repository, which have had over 1.5 million downloads, and we are working toward encompassing all such papers since the beginning of the school, as well as many student papers and student-edited law reviews. Last year the repository had visitors from 6,039 cities and nearly 170 countries around the globe. It has become one of the major sites for open-access legal scholarship on the World Wide Web.

Fred Shapiro

Jan. 15

The writer is an associate librarian at Yale Law School.

YALE DAILY NEWS