07/31/2024
By Katharine Webster

Jake Velazquez ’24 came to UMass Lowell with a scholarship to run on the Division I cross country team and study music. The pianist and singer majored in composition for new media.

But by the end of his sophomore year, Velazquez was overwhelmed by the combination of daily, four-hour running practices and more hours of music homework, rehearsals with music ensembles and weekend cross country meets.

He consulted his advisor in Athletics, who suggested that Velazquez pursue a Bachelor of Liberal Arts (BLA) degree that would allow him to combine music with a second concentration. Velazquez had already completed the courses he needed for the music concentration, and he developed a complementary set of skills when he chose digital media as his second focus area, taking classes in video editing and production.

That second concentration helped him land a paid summer internship at prize-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’s Florentine Films studio in Walpole, New Hampshire, where Velazquez organized, researched and edited archival footage for use in a new Burns film. He’s now applying for similar jobs.

“The BLA helped me think more like an entrepreneur,” says Velazquez, who is from Keene, New Hampshire. “I learned that I had a lot of different skills. I could do video content; I could write scripts for videos, but I could also write music for those videos.”

Political Science Assoc. Prof. Adam Lerner, who directs the BLA, says that’s exactly what the liberal arts major is designed to do: let students customize their studies across academic disciplines to meet their personal interests and career goals.

Image by Virgilia Gambon

In the liberal arts major, based in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, students select two concentrations from a possible 27, including interdisciplinary options such as health studies and architectural studies. The degree is also offered online with more than a dozen concentrations.

In addition, students take the Foundations in Liberal Studies class, where they learn how to examine complex topics using a variety of methods and take a capstone class that requires them to complete an interdisciplinary research, artistic or community project, Lerner says.

Velazquez wrote a research paper on heavy metal music videos. He compared videos by power metal bands to those by British new wave-era heavy metal bands, analyzing how videos from each subgenre reflected different aspects of “metalhead” culture. He says no other program would have let him do such a deep dive into the music he loves.

The BLA “is a really good program if you want to have a little more control over what you study,” Velazquez says.

Lerner agrees.

“There is room in the BLA for students to do almost anything,” he says. “We allow students to be driven by their real-world interests, and we have a lot of flexibility around that, but it is a rigorous program.”

The BLA was created in the early 1990s and became more structured in 2015 with the addition of the foundation and capstone classes.

Long a home for students who want to switch fields without prolonging their time to graduation, the BLA is now a first choice for many students who want to customize their studies. It has grown to be the third-largest undergraduate program in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Honors College graduate Gabrielle Salvatore ’24 chose the liberal arts major from the start, pursuing concentrations in psychology and education and then adding a minor in Spanish. She did her capstone research on the benefits and challenges of bilingual education. Her cumulative academic achievements earned her the BLA Academic Excellence Award.

Image by K. Webster

“The longer I was in the program, the more it opened up my eyes to possibilities,” says Salvatore, a native of Lunenberg, Massachusetts. “There’s a million things I can do with my degree.”

What she has decided to do is go to graduate school to become an early childhood educator.

“Working with younger kids, having a background in psychology and education is super-beneficial,” Salvatore says. “I feel prepared.”

Other students choose the BLA because they want to expand on an interdisciplinary minor, such as American studies or legal studies, or add a second area of study without double-majoring. Likewise, transfer students may choose the BLA because their previous major – for example, political anthropology or sports journalism – doesn’t “transfer neatly” into an equivalent major at UMass Lowell, Lerner says.

Sandi DeRuntz, a transfer student who earned an associate degree online at a Virginia community college during the pandemic, enrolled at UMass Lowell as a psychology major.

Image by K. Webster

Her psychology coursework was intense, and DeRuntz decided that she needed a class “just for me.” She enrolled in Sculpture I with Art Assoc. Prof. Yuko Oda – and she loved it so much that she was determined to take every class that Oda teaches. The Dunstable, Massachusetts, resident switched her major to liberal arts, with concentrations in studio art and psychology and a minor in disability studies.

DeRuntz, who has systemic lupus, had planned to go to law school and become a disability rights lawyer, but then she took a seminar on adaptive devices co-taught by Oda and faculty in engineering and physical therapy.

In the class, students work in teams to solve practical problems for real people with disabilities. After hearing from a man about the difficulties he had dressing himself after losing the use of one arm, DeRuntz came up with the idea for ZipperBuddy, an adaptive device that, once installed on a piece of clothing, allows people to close it up with one hand.

DeRuntz, a senior who won two awards in UML’s DifferenceMaker business idea competitions while working on the project with various teammates, now has a provisional patent on ZipperBuddy and is in talks with a company about manufacturing it.

A single mother of two who has worked in a variety of jobs, she says the structure of the BLA helped her find her passion and purpose – and allowed her to run with it.

“I want to create accessible devices and get them to whoever needs them, to give people independence and freedom,” she says. “I feel very confident in saying I finally know what I want to be when I grow up.”