A degree built around what you actually want to study
Most degrees ask you to fit yourself into a category that already exists. The Individualized Major starts from the other direction. You choose the courses, from any program at MIU, that fulfill your own personal vision, then work with an advisor to shape them into a coherent degree with a name you write yourself.
Some students arrive knowing exactly what they want to build. Others arrive with a set of interests that have never sat comfortably in one department and a sense that the connection between them matters. Both work here.
What does an Individualized Major include?
- Courses from any program at MIU. You can draw from every field the university teaches, so a degree can combine health science with communication design, or agriculture with business, without either half being an afterthought.
- A degree title you define yourself. The name on your diploma describes the degree you created, not the closest existing category.
- Academic depth. Your degree plan must form a coherent field of study and include advanced coursework that demonstrates appropriate upper-division depth.
- Consciousness as the common ground. Every MIU degree rests on the direct experience of consciousness through the Transcendental Meditation technique. Whichever fields you combine, Consciousness-Based Education makes your own development part of the academic work.
- Optional internships. Applied work can be built into your plan, so coursework connects to work you want to be doing.
Key questions
- Will employers and graduate schools take a self-designed degree seriously?
- Can I use credits I’ve already earned?
- When is the next entry?
- Yes. MIU is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the same body that accredits major universities across the Midwest.
Yes. Your transcript shows an accredited bachelor’s degree from Maharishi International University, and your degree title describes a real, defined field of study. What differs is that you defined it. Graduates report that the proposal process itself made them better at articulating their expertise, which tends to show up well in interviews and applications.
Degrees our students have designed
Recent graduates designed and completed degrees including:
- Storytelling Through Consciousness
- Sustainable Agribusiness & Food Innovation
- Conscious Leadership & Interpersonal Development
- Science of Consciousness & the Entangled Quantum Mind
- Integrative Healing & Expressive Arts
- Regenerative Systems & Human Ecology
- Digital Media & Conscious Entrepreneurship
- Harmonious Social Structures
- Psychology, Consciousness, & Integrative Wellness
- Sustainable Design & Placemaking
How does designing an Individualized Major work?
After you enroll at MIU, you explore courses across departments and discover what you want to study. Because MIU’s Block System has you take just one or two courses at a time, it’s easy to adjust your path as your personal and professional goals come into focus.
In your senior year, you develop a degree proposal that sets out your degree title and the courses that make up your major. Your advisor works through the proposal with you until the plan holds together academically and reflects your goals.
What can you do with this degree?
- Enter work that sits between fields. Wellness coaching, sustainability consulting, regenerative farm management, and health communications each draw on two or three disciplines that live in separate departments. Designing your own major lets you cover all of them in one degree instead of picking one and minoring in another.
- Bring an unusual combination to a conventional role. A background in both health science and leadership, or both media and sustainability, is a differentiator in fields where most applicants have one or the other.
- Build toward work you’re already doing. Students who come in mid-career often shape the degree around a business, practice, or body of work they want to formalize and grow.
- Prepare for graduate study. Your advisor can help you build in the prerequisites a target graduate program expects, so the degree opens doors rather than narrowing them.
Your admissions counselor will provide you with all the details of becoming a student, including connecting you with program faculty when you have questions.
This course is your entryway into MIU and Consciousness-Based Education. We dive into an ancient yet radically new framework for understanding the universe and our place in it. This model holds that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental. With this in mind, we look at some of life’s big questions: How can we develop our fullest potential as human beings? How do art and stories help us understand that potential? How can our own growth help create a more just and peaceful society? What do the world’s great wisdom traditions have in common? How can we improve education and healthcare? The new paradigm we explore in this course infuses all your classes at MIU. In this course, you'll learn the Transcendental Meditation® technique to awaken the full potential of consciousness in your life.
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