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The Default Library · Majors

What each major knows.

A university degree, rebuilt for the pleasure of knowing. Every subject is one interactive piece that gives you the intuition a graduate keeps for life, the ideas and forces at play, and the textbooks to get if you want to go deeper. You won’t come out an engineer, an economist or a marketer. You’ll come out knowing what they see.

14majors
131subjects
48shared
27hours of reading
Major

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

How a machine, a bridge, an engine and an aircraft stand up, move, heat up and stay under control.

21 subjects · 4.1 hours
Shares most with Civil Engineering (14) and Electrical Engineering (10)
Major

Computer Science

How computers compute, what can and can't be computed, and how to build software that works.

17 subjects · 3.3 hours
Shares most with Mathematics (8) and Electrical Engineering (7)
Major

Electrical Engineering

How electricity is made, moved, shaped and turned into information: from the grid to the chip to the radio in your pocket.

20 subjects · 4.1 hours
Shares most with Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (10) and Physics (9)
Major

Economics

How people, firms and countries choose when they can't have everything, and how to tell what actually caused what.

15 subjects · 3 hours
Shares most with Business Administration (10) and Marketing (6)
Major

Business Administration

How an organisation turns people, money and ideas into something customers will pay for, and keeps doing it.

16 subjects · 3.4 hours
Shares most with Economics (10) and Marketing (9)
Major

Marketing

How people decide what to buy, and how organisations earn a place in their minds honestly.

16 subjects · 3.2 hours
Shares most with Business Administration (9) and Economics (6)
Major

Civil Engineering

How the bridges, buildings, roads, dams, pipes and water a society runs on are designed to stand up, last and keep people safe.

22 subjects · 4.5 hours
Shares most with Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (14) and Electrical Engineering (8)
Major

Mathematics

What is true for certain, why, and how far the structures of number, space and change reach.

19 subjects · 3.9 hours
Shares most with Physics (9) and Computer Science (8)
Major

Physics

What the universe is made of, how it moves, and how we know: from the pendulum to the Big Bang.

22 subjects · 4.4 hours
Shares most with Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (9) and Electrical Engineering (9)
Major

Architecture

How buildings and cities are imagined, drawn, made to stand, made comfortable and made to mean something.

15 subjects · 3.2 hours
Shares most with Civil Engineering (6) and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (4)
Major

Law

What law is for, how lawyers reason, and how the world's legal families answer the same human questions differently.

17 subjects · 3.7 hours
Shares most with Political Science (6) and Business Administration (3)
Major

Political Science

Who gets what, when and how: power, institutions, elections, war and peace, studied with evidence.

15 subjects · 3.2 hours
Shares most with Law (6) and Economics (5)
Major

Psychology

How minds work, how we know, and which famous findings held up.

14 subjects · 2.9 hours
Shares most with Marketing (5) and Economics (3)
Major

Literature

How words make worlds: reading closely, the forms stories and poems take, and the literatures of every continent.

9 subjects · 1.8 hours
Shares most with Law (1) and Political Science (1)

The map

Each row needs something from the rows above it. Tap a subject to see what it builds on and what it opens up; tap a major to see its whole route. Subjects in two colours are shared: learn them once and they count for both. Finished subjects get a tick.

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