Other Opportunities

Learn about other educational opportunities available to Dietrich College students.

Campus Opportunities
Research Opportunities
Courses with Open Seats

Campus Opportunities

Spring 2025 CMU Libraries Workshops

The CMU Libraries are kicking off our workshops for the spring, which range in subject from coding and data visualization to portfolios and bibliographies, to arts and entrepreneurship and are taught by experts from across the Libraries and beyond. The workshops are free of charge and open to CMU students, staff, faculty and alumni. Seating is limited and registration is required.

Explore the full schedule and find links to register on the Workshop Calendar.

Nominations Open for 2025 Gelfand Student Educational Outreach Award

Deadline: April 22

Each year the Gelfand Center recognizes three students who have made a commitment to sharing their knowledge, talents, skills and time to make a difference in the lives of children in the community, with a priority for STEM educational outreach activities. Three students will each earn a $250 prize! All nomination materials are due by Tuesday, April 22.

This is a self-nomination process, with letters of support provided by on-campus or community partners who know about your work. Fill out the self-nomination form or email GelfandCenter@andrew.cmu.edu.

Research Opportunities

Summer Research Opportunities

Collaborative Research Through Projects
99-520 (6 or 9 units, tuition-free)
Preferred deadline: Mar. 28
Final enrollment deadline: May 2

These collaborative research courses aim to provide students with the opportunity to engage in cohort-based research endeavors that makes a contribution to an area of research, field or topic. Most courses have limited prerequisites. Review the listing of courses and learn how to enroll.

Summer Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship (SURA)
99-270 (3, 6, 9, or 12 units, tuition free)
Deadline: May 9

Complete a research apprenticeship with a faculty member in any field of study, including artistic/creative inquiry, and engage in professional development programming offered by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholar Development. Application Information can be found on the SURA website.

Undergraduate Summer Research
99-409 (1 unit, tuition free)
Deadline: May 9

This course allows undergraduate students from all fields to participate in research (including artistic/creative inquiry) under the direction of a CMU faculty member. Students should have previously participated in summer research via the Summer Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship (SURA) and/or the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) before enrolling. Two forms are required prior to enrollment – one from the student (pdf) and one from the advising faculty member (pdf).

Courses & Academic Programs

School of drama courses for non-majors

54-185 Writing the Dungeon: What is it like to write a story when you, the very author, have no say in the outcome? How does a writer prepare for the inevitable devolvement of their precious work at the hands of several Mountain Dew and Dorito-fueled fools (myself included) who like to play pretend? Role Playing Games are a layered and gritty performative art - one which involves the passing of writing to a human who is then responsible for guiding several other humans through a collective experience. This is tricky - like a game of distorted-magic telephone - and thus, it requires a unique approach to write them. This class recognizes the creation of RPGs as a creative writing process, and will explore the puzzling experience of crafting in the open-ended and choice-driven narrative style of Role Playing Games. Utilizing the Dungeons and Dragons: 5th Edition game system, students will learn to craft a dungeon of their own, paying close attention to the complexities of writing specifically for the Dungeon Master's utility. We will isolate and examine the elements of a 5-10 room dungeon: Monsters & Villains, Traps & Maps, Clues & the NPC, and learn to implement them in our own playable work.
54-187 Writing the Speculative Play: Speculative fiction is a super genre that spans from science fiction to fantasy, horror to magical realism, fairy tale to dystopian lit. In this class, we will build, dissect, and write worlds that are not the one we live in. In the first half of the semester, we will imagine our plays’ worlds as their own planet with their own rules of space, time, and physics. We will imagine the beings that inhabit our new worlds and ask ourselves how they interact, what they prioritize, and how they speak, as we attempt to discover what about our own world is illuminated when we look outside of it. In the second half of the semester, we will use our newly generated worlds to write and workshop speculative plays of our own. This class is open to all CMU students.
54-183 Introduction to Playwriting: To write plays, one must read them and see them, and understand how they deliver a story to an audience. The first half of this course will be devoted to learning what a play looks like and how it can exist. We will watch recordings of Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Colored Museum, and Fat Ham together in class and respond to them through conversation and Canvas discussion posts. The second half of this course will be dedicated to formatting, structuring, and writing a play, with time in class to read and write new material. By the end of this course, students will have a logline, beat outline, and first draft of an original play.
54-169 Curating the Writer's Life: Demolishing perfection, defeating the blank page and finishing your projects.

CMU Prison education project (CMU PEP) Courses

All CMU PEP courses are taught in a state correctional institution. Students and professors will ride a bus together to and from campus. Learn more about CMU PEP.

71-251: Exploring Creative Writing in Community
Professor: Jane McCafferty
This course exposes students to nonfiction, fiction and poetry, with the aim of teaching students the craft of writing about their own lived experience. Everyone will read books, stories, essays and poems together. Students will create their own writings that they will share with one another in our writing workshop, based on prompts from the professor. The course does not require extensive writing experience, just a strong desire to read and write and tell stories. We’ll consider how the way we craft stories about our lives can end up changing the way we see ourselves, each other, and the world. Class will be run as a discussion, where all are invited to participate. Emphasis will be on deep listening and developing community connection, as everyone learns more about the craft of writing.
76-245: Shakespeare - Tragedies and Histories
Professor: Stephen Wittek
In the closing decades of the sixteenth century, enterprising cultural producers in early modern London began to develop a new commercial venture called ‘playing’: a business that offered ordinary people a few hours of dramatic entertainment for the price of one penny. More than four hundred years later, the drama of the period now ranks among the most esteemed texts in all English literature, and the name ‘Shakespeare’ has become a byword for literary genius. This course will offer an overview of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, exploring what these plays meant in their original context. This course meets a GenEd requirement.

Department of English Courses

We invite you to check out our New & Noteworthy fall 2025 courses via our flipbook. We're offering Comic Books & Pop Culture, Exploring Creative Writing in Community, Science Fictions/Speculative Futures and more! We'd love to see you in our classes!

#EnglishIsForEveryone

Questions? Interested? Curious? Contact Laura Donaldson, assistant director of undergraduate programs and academic advisor, at ldonalds@andrew.cmu.edu.

Human computer Interaction Institute

Learn about HCI special topics offerings for fall 2025! There are both undergraduate and graduate level courses available.