First-Year Seminars

Classroom First-Year Seminars are an array of specially designed courses offered only to first-year students. Students choose from dozens of intriguing seminars creatively designed to hone writing, speaking, critical thinking, and other learning skills. Each seminar is built around a provocative personal interest of the instructor.

  • Enrollment is limited to 16
  • FYS classes encourage participation and discussion
  • To keep conversation going outside the classroom, members of each seminar are assigned to the same residence hall

Seminars

FYS-102-3 The World's Children

FYS-103 Natives on Film

FYS-107 The Bush Administration: Approach to the War on Terror, Torture, and Prisoners of War.

FYS-110-3 The Literature of Vocation

FYS-112-2 Connecting Here and There, and Now and Then: Developing Global Imagination

FYS-114 Propaganda, Persuasion and the Public Sphere: Democracy in an Age of Mass Media

FYS-115-3 Electoral Politics: Parties, Procedures, Strategies and Reform

FYS-118-2 Why Jazz Matters: The Legacy of Pops, Duke, and Miles

FYS-121-3 Soldiers’ Tales – Reading and Writing War

FYS-126-2 Do’h! Psychology and The Simpsons

FYS-128-2 Shakespeare: Then & Now!

FYS-128-3 Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women’s Literature in English

FYS-130-1 Women's Health and Sexuality

FYS-130-2 Pills, Potions, Poisons, and Pathogens: Exploring the Mysterious World of Fungi

FYS-135-2 The Secret Life of Puppets

FYS-136-3 I Think, Therefore I Write: Philosophy in French Fiction

FYS-138 Infernal Voyages

FYS-138-2 Plato, Personhood, and Popcorn: Big Ideas on the Big Screen

FYS-139-2 Logic, Brain, and Society: Critical Thinking and How To Stop It

FYS-141-3 But Is It Crazy Enough?

FYS-143-3 Flipping the Switch

FYS-146-2 Cryptography: The Science of Secrecy

FYS-150 Death and the Meaning of Life

FYS-155-2 Cancer in Society: A War Against Immortality

FYS-156-2 Green Eggs And Government Cheese: Food For Environmental Sustainability

FYS-157-2 Food, Water, Shelter, Song: Staying Human on a Planet in Transition

FYS-159-3 The Romance and Trauma of Exile

FYS-165 Anarchism and the Anarchist

FYS-167 The Pity of War

FYS-172-2 Science and Technology Italian StyleScience & Tech Italian Style

FYS-174 Four Years, Far Away

FYS-176-2 Lasers: Light and Easy!

FYS-177 Complementary Medicine: A Cultural and Scientific Inquiry

FYS-178 An Experimental Avatar: Discovering Economics

FYS-178-2 Voice of the Rebel in America

FYS-179 Language in a Multicultural America

FYS-180-3 This Film Inspired By: Screening Multicultural Literature

FYS-183 Investigate the Battlefield of Gettysburg

FYS-183-4 Blood on the Moon: Literature and the American Civil War

FYS-185-2 The Long Shadow of the Civil War

FYS-192-3 Yoga: Ancient Philosophy, Global Phenomenon

FYS-193-2 Cultural Perspectives on the Body

FYS-198-2 Tryin' to find a Way Back Home: Introduction to Literature of Homelessness in America