Search for January 2025 Term Courses

Students develop fundamental skills in creative entrepreneurship andexplore ways to attract capital. This experientially based class draws from time-tested entrepreneurial methods to assist students, regardless of their discipline, to create entrepreneurially. Students also learn to act entrepreneurially within existing organizations,intrapreneurship, a process making employees more valuable to the companies they work inand for. Entrepreneurship is an experiential process. Consequently, students in this course engage in games, simulations, demonstrations, and other experiential exercises to offerexperiential insights in what it is to act entrepreneurially. Students will also travel to area arts and nonprofit organizations including Meow Wolf in Santa Fe and other sites. Uses experiential learning to gain foundational knowledge of creative entrepreneurship and explore ways to attract capital. Topics include branding, creativity as the keystone of entrepreneurship, crowdfunding, event-based fundraising, leveraging inherent assets, website creation, pitching angel investors and venture capitalists, acting entrepreneurially within existing organizations, navigating startup processes, and other critical entrepreneurship topics.

The topic of Human Rights is a recently invented discourse, and one that has contributed to many positive changes around the globe since 1948. Even so, definitions, responsibilities, and the cross-cultural context of these “rights” remain a source of debate and accusation as a great many humans in the world continue to suffer. This course examines the concept of Human Rights critically, with an eye for cross-cultural variation, and with a particular focus on rights that are health-related including climate change, human environments, and human rights and health. A diversity of students will benefit from the lectures, case studies, and dialogues in this seminar, but a goal of the course is to prepare students for careful inquiry to and application of this powerful policy idea for both international and local settings. In the Taos campus version of this course, we engage heavily in applying anthropological frameworks and materials in New Mexico through various fieldtrips focusing specifically on engineering and human health in Taos and Northern New Mexico.

This course examines traditional Native American and Spanish arts and cultures of the American Southwest between 100 CE and the 21st century. We refer also to Anglo arts in the region, though this is deemphasized in Janterm. The course considers the effects of ethnicity, gender, and community identity on regional art traditions and places artworks within their material, religious, political, and economic contexts. Astronomical alignments, water, earth and sky, spirits and saints, the living and their ancestors—these are among the themes in the art of the region. The course is designed specifically for SMU-in-Taos. Many class days include field trips or interactive projects. Films, readings, and PowerPoint slide talks set the stage for visits to artists’ studios, archaeological sites, pueblos, churches, and museums. Hands-on art projects are simple and require no previous art experience to succeed. They help students understand the technical and aesthetic qualities of artworks we study in this class.

An overview of the ecology, evolution, and identification of plants and animals of the Southwest region. The course will heavily rely on the wildlife around Taos as a teaching tool. You will go on 2 hikes, learn to identify plants and animals, and give two presentations on evolution and wildlife. An introduction to the major concepts of biological thought for the nonscience major. Learn about the geology and ecology of the Southwest, the role human plays in conservation and sustainability of our planet, and the major events that took place in the evolution of life. BIOL 1300 is not open to students with prior credit in BIOL 1301 or BIOL 1401.

This interdisciplinary course explores the history of New Mexico, from the pre-contact era to the present. In the first half of the class, we will consider New Mexico’s successive and overlapping waves of human settlement, from Pueblo Indians, to the Spanish Empire, the Mexican Republic, and the United States, with particular attention to the complex relationships between Native peoples, Hispanos, and Anglo-Americans. Then we will turn to a handful of key topics that continue to define the so-called Land of Enchantment even today: religion and spirituality; the natural world (particularly New Mexico’s scarce water resources); and its enduring cultural symbolism as reflected in literature and film.

This course introduces religion in the context of globalization and modernity. Taos is an ideal place to study this as several global faiths are represented in town. We will visit sites relevant to Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism as well as consider 'New Age' and indigenous traditions and material culture and the ways religion can be marketized and commercialized for non-adherents.

Review of fundamentals of vibrations with application of simple machine and structural members. Topics include harmonic motion, free and forced vibration, resonance, damping, isolation, and transmissibility. Single, multiple, and infinite degree-of-freedom systems are also examined. Mechanical Engineering students must complete over 120 credit hours to obtain their bachelor's degree from SMU. Many of these students highly value the chance to take their core ME course in Taos, with its stunning scenery, intimate class sizes, skiing, and hospitable environment.

The Jan Term Mountain Sports class in Taos will be focused on winter sports and fitness. Students will receive ski and snowboard instruction. Exercise and health-related fitness principles as described in the course objectives will be reviewed and discussed in which presentation/lecture/discussion will replace the workout for those class periods. Students will create a personal fitness plan. A knowledge test will be administered at the end of the term. Each student will be provided with lift passes to Taos Ski Valley, lessons, and ski/snowboard gear.

Social psychology is the study of how the presence of others influences our ABCs - Affect, Behavior, and Cognition. The course addresses the question of how an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and influenced by his/her social environment. This includes topics such as attitudes change, conformity, attraction, aggression, and small-group behavior. After completing this course, you should be able to discuss social psychology in relation to general psychology, other disciplines, and your own life and interests. You should be able to demonstrate both a general knowledge of the field as well as an advanced understanding of a few specialized topics. By taking this course at the SMU in Taos campus, you will be able to experience social psychology beyond the traditional classroom. We will have field trips and off-campus experiences at several different locations. You will also have a chance to engage the local community and apply your course material in one of several project options.

STAT 4340, “Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists”, covers a variety of topics related to more advanced statistical techniques and the theory behind these methodologies. This course is a core class for majors in math, statistics, engineering, CSE, and EMIS. In the course, we will first study descriptive measures (mean, median, quartiles, standard deviation) and then consider the relationship between the population and sample, and its importance in statistics. We will then focus on probability calculations in both the discrete and continuous univariate cases, and then shift our emphasis to multivariate distributions. At that point, we will study inferential statistics, often the key goal of statistical analyses. Calculus will be used to derive many of the methodologies. Students in this class will benefit from the professor’s experience in applying mathematical theory to the field of statistics, and how this is applied to industry-type problems.

This interdisciplinary and experiential course examines the intersections of food and identity in the Southwest. Through literary and scholarly texts, film, fine arts, pop culture, and experiences, students explore topics such as heritage and tradition, cultural contact and exchange, conquest, resistance and revolution, issues of gender, and responses to modernity and change in the so-called “American Southwest.” Examines how technology (including agriculture, cooking technology, commercial farming, global trade networks, and social media) impacts the production, consumption, distribution, dynamics of power, and systems of meaning of food and eating in this region. Watch Course Video