First-Year Seminars

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

Trying to Find a Way Back Home

Ask Christopher Fee to talk about his First-Year Seminar on homelessness in the United States, and - like any good English professor - he's quick to use a metaphor.

In this case, the image is a sinking ship. Well, maybe not a sinking ship. Fee quickly amended the first image to a leaking boat. "What we do in this course," he said, "is think about how the boat is put together and where the holes are and how we can begin to address the holes in the boat at the same time that we're bailing water out. I want students to be thinking about how big the boat is, where the boat's going, where the holes are. And what are these holes? Are they caused by rocks? Have we hit something? And how are we going to fix those holes?" Read more

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