The Fastest Way to Get a Triple Major

Get ready to learn Persian, buddy.

In my last post, I looked at how language majors at Indiana University compared in terms of their curricular structure. While doing that, one thing stuck out to me.

There are three separate majors in which you can do all your language credits in Persian. The Central Eurasian Studies, India Studies, and the Middle Eastern Languages and Culture degrees all allow for it. When you look at each bulletin’s listed “restrictions on combining this major other academic programs,” you’ll see that they only include programs internal to their own departments.

So if it’s possible to earn credit in 3 majors by studying one language, I had to know how efficiently one could complete this particular academic speedrun here at IU.

Chad Persian-knower (you after following this plan)

Central Eurasian Studies

We’ll treat this major as our baseline. It doesn’t really matter which major you begin your career with, but this is the most common major for students studying Persian, so we’ll begin here.

We will need to take an introductory and a capstone course for this major, adding up to 6 credits.

For our Persian requirement, I am assuming that our theoretical student has no history with the language. As such, we will need to start with the introductory course, CEUS-T 151. We’ll need to take 3 years of Persian to satisfy the major requirement, totaling 24 credits. Of those, only the last 16 credits count toward the major’s requirements, but the two introductory Persian courses will count toward our overall credit requirement for graduation.

From here, our only requirements are four electives, but we are going to be particular with the ones we choose for reasons I’ll soon disclose. So we are going to take the following:

• CEUS-R 329 Topics in Central Asian Studies

• CEUS-R 351 Prophets, Poets, and Kings: Iranian Civilization

• CEUS-R 370 Introduction to the History of Tibet

• CEUS-R 371 Tibet and the West

And just like that, we’ve completed our Central Eurasian Studies major, taking 42 credits so far.

India Studies

This is where things start to get exciting. Let’s start with a list of the new courses we have to do.

• INST-I 100 Introduction to India

• REL-R 153 Religions of Asia

• REL-B 414 Buddhist Philosophy in India

• Any one additional elective

That is 12 credits. And that’s all we have to do.

How? I’ll show you.

You’re required to do a language through the intermediate level, which we already did in Persian. 8 of those credits count toward our major.

We also need to take one course from the “Society” list for the major, along with three more eligible electives. Luckily, the four electives we took for Central Eurasian Studies satisfy this requirement, contributing 12 more credits toward the major.

And we’re done! Four additional classes and we have a double major. So far, we’ve completed 54 academic credits.

So then, what will it take to go for three?

Middle Eastern Languages and Culture (language track)

Once again, let’s begin with what we need to do:

• MELC-M 215 The Middle East Before Islam

• MELC-M 365 Islamic Philosophy

• MELC-M 350 Modern Iran

That is 9 credits, and that’s all we need to do.

This is possible because the MELC major, uniquely, gives major credit for introductory language classes. If we then add on our two advanced Persian courses as electives, we’ve earned 24 credits toward the major before we begin.

This leaves us just needing to take one course each in the “pre-Islamic,” “medieval,” and “modern” course lists for the major.

With that, we’ve completed three majors in 63 credits. Recall that you need 120 credits in order to graduate, so we must be missing something…

General Education

Indiana University, like most institutions of American higher education, has broad requirements for all students to ensure that they have some exposure to something outside their major during their time in college. The goal is to produce well-rounded graduates.

Of course, when you have tens of thousands of students, you need to have more than one way of satisfying those requirements. So while there are ten separate general education categories for the IU College of Arts and Sciences (to which all three of our majors belong), some general education requirements can be met via coursework in your major. Additionally, some courses can satisfy multiple general education requirements at the same time.

The result of this complex arrangement is a gamification of academic planning. Students are incentivized to seek shortcuts in completing the requirements, to attempt to “beat the system.”

And that’s exactly what we’re going to do now.

So let’s start with what we still need to do. I’ll list which general education requirements they satisfy alongside each course:

• ENG-W 131 Reading, Writing, and Inquiry (English Composition)

• COLL-C 103 Critical Approaches to the Arts and Humanities (Critical Thinking)

• COLL-P 155 Public Oral Communication (Public Speaking)

• AMST-A 201 U.S. Movements and Institutions (Diversity in the United States/ Sustainability Literacy)

That is 12 credits, and it’s all we need to do.

There are five other categories we need to satisfy as students in the College of Arts and Sciences, but let’s see how we’re doing with that.

Our Foreign Language and Global Civilization requirements have already been met by studying Persian and through our major coursework.

We had to take four Arts and Humanities courses. We did this through the COLL-C 103 course we did for general education, alongside our Buddhist Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy, and Asian Religion courses.

We also had to take four Society and History courses. We did this with our introductory Central Eurasia course, our courses on the history of Iran and Tibet, and our course on the pre-Islamic Middle East.

At this point, we’ve completed 75 credits. But I do have one more trick to pull for our general education credits.

Math minor

The two remaining general education requirements are one course in Mathematical Modeling and four courses in Natural and Mathematical Science (N&M).

So the minimum required to complete what remains is 15 credits, but the math modeling credit can also count for N&M, meaning we can take just 12 more credits to finish general education.

So that’s our answer to the question. You can complete three majors and general education in 87 credits, leaving you with lots of room to do what you want before graduation. Perhaps now you want to go back to those majors that you sped through and flesh out your education a bit.

Or perhaps you want to see how much further you can take this thing.

There are several ways you can satisfy the “mathematical modeling” requirement. What I’d like to do is find a way that I can take a course that satisfies that requirement, along with a “natural and mathematical science” requirement, and can help me begin another program of study.

We’re going to have to imagine something about ourselves again. Let’s pretend that in high school we completed Pre-Calculus. With that in mind, we can enroll in MATH-M 211 Calculus 1.

That course satisfies “mathematical modeling” and gets us started on completing a Math minor. If we continue and take MATH-M 212 Calculus 2, along with two more four-credit math courses, we’ll have simultaneously completed our general education and a math minor.

The math minor is 16 credits, a difference of just four more credits from the minimum. So with 91 credits, we now have three majors and one minor.

And now the world’s your oyster

Most majors at IU are between 30-35 credits. As such, you could reasonably add a fourth major, taking as few as 121 credits total before graduation.

What would a budding Persian scholar like you benefit from? Maybe Sociology? Political Science? Art History? Or maybe you want to add a second minor by learning Norwegian or Hebrew or French?

Of course, this all assumes that you haven’t satisfied any of your requirements before starting college. You could have even more space in your schedule if you pass out of some of your general education during high school, a trend that is more common now than ever with the proliferation of dual credit courses.

But now, looking back, what have we accomplished? Our Persian education has been incredibly efficient. Maximally efficient even. And that efficiency feels very satisfying. For the rest of your life you’d be able to humblebrag about your quadruple major with a math minor.

What would be the use of three overlapping regional studies majors? Who cares! You’d have it.

The issue is that this is all quantified education. We have no idea whether the courses we selected made for a well-developed graduate. We only know that the courses made for a graduated graduate.

Major universities like Indiana feature hundreds of majors, thousands of courses, and millions of potential combinations to receive a degree. With that diffusion of options comes a diffusion of responsibility for education. The university itself lays little claim on what an educated graduate looks like, and the wholly different experiences of each student speak to the discontinuity of the idea of “being educated” itself.

But, I will admit, it’s fun. Figuring out how to “outsmart” the institution and get a maximized degree is exciting. But is it also an indictment on higher education writ large?

I dunno. Maybe?

-Matt

p.s. There are fewer than 40 students currently enrolled in these three majors total at IU. Most of them are not studying Persian. I expect no one has tried this, so it’s possible that this plan would be legislated out of potentiality as soon as it was attempted.

p.p.s. I discovered in November 2024 that the entire premise of this post was false. You can read my retraction here. My bad!