SHS Program
Photographs taken by Claire Hennel, Madeleine Hueber, and Mélinda Pereira as part of the Graphic Design SHS course at ECAL with Tamara Niklaus and Denis Roueche. Graphic design by Blaise Magnenat.
The Social Science and Humanities (SHS) Program integrates disciplines dealing with people and society into the EPFL student curriculum. It is common to all of the school’s study plans.
Its mission is twofold:
- to develop a critical understanding of the world we live in by offering introductory and advanced courses in the humanities and social sciences;
- to build the cross-disciplinary skills that will enable tomorrow’s engineers and scientists to have a positive and lasting impact.
By combining these two objectives, the SHS Program plays a central role in EPFL’s educational mission: to train engineers who combine scientific excellence, practical skills, and social responsibility.
Thanks to a wide-ranging inter-institutional partnership with the University of Lausanne (UNIL), nearly 100 teachers and researchers, all experts in their respective fields, offer around 150 courses covering all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
The knowledge acquired during the program provides our future graduates with the necessary benchmarks to understand the world in which their research and innovation will take place. It is the compass that will guide their engagement in the challenges facing our society.
→ Study plan
→ Information for students
→ SHS teaching team schedule
→ Teaching Commission
→ Brochure pdf
→ Contacts
Testimonials
SHSKENDITU?: The SHS Program explained by students
We met with a few students and asked them to explain what SHS is and share their experiences.
Foucault’s pendulum: demonstrating the Earth’s rotation!
As part of the “Experimental History of Science” course, students reproduced Léon Foucault’s 1851 experiment at the Panthéon in Paris in the EPFL MED hall. The aim was to study the experiment and compare the opinions of spectators nearly two centuries apart!