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For questions about the First-Year Experience contact Dr. Douglas Lamoreaux, Director of the First-Year Experience at 253-535-8342 or via email at lamorecd@plu.edu

What is the First-Year Experience?

The First-Year Experience consists of two courses designed to help first-year students make the transition to college-level study:

• First-Year Writing Seminar (Writing 101)
• First-Year Inquiry Seminar

In addition to these two courses, all first-year students complete a J-term course that serves to foster community and broaden students' understanding of PLU's unique educational goals.

Regardless of which core you choose or which major you intend to pursue, all first-year students entering with less than 20 transfer credits must complete the First-Year Experience.

A Supportive Learning Environment:

First-Year Experience seminars are structured to provide first-year students with a nurturing and supportive learning environment.

• Small classes: allow for maximum interaction between professors and students.
• Learning with your peers: classes enrolled with only first-year students provides a comfortable environment in which to make the transition to college-level academics.

A Focus on Skills:

First-Year Experience seminars focus on the skills necessary for being both a successful student and a thoughtful, productive, and caring member of society.

• Thinking: Students learn to inquire more deeply and effectively into thought-provoking issues.
• Literacy: Students learn to communicate more effectively, as writers, readers, speakers and listeners.
• Community: Students learn how to work in a community of learners while exploring issues of importance to our larger society.

Learning as a Process of Inquiry:

First-Year Experience seminars teach these skills through application. Students are guided through a process of inquiry focusing on a thought-provoking theme or subject.

• First-Year Writing Seminars are focused on compelling themes such as "Hard Times and Our Times," "Fathers and Sons," or "Animal Rights." View a list of the 2002-03 Writing 101 topics.
• Inquiry Seminars introduce first-year students to the process of intellectual exploration within a particular academic discipline or field. For instance, how does philosophy approach questions of morality? How has American literature portrayed the individual's relation to nature, society and the divine? How do computer scientists approach the vexing problem of privacy in our technological world? View a list of the 2003-04 Inquiry Seminar topics.

What Will I Learn in My First-Year Writing Seminar?

Writing Seminars help students learn the skills necessary to be a better writer, researcher and critical thinker in college.

Thinking: Students learn how to think like a writer in various disciplines and types of writing; how writers inquire into ideas, how to raise questions that really matter, how to explore and research problems, and how to look at issues from multiple perspectives.

Literacy: Students receive intensive practice in reading and writing at the college level. You'll learn how to shape your writing into effective public prose, and you'll read-and write-in response to challenging works by other authors.

Community: Working closely with your classmates and receiving substantial personal critiques from professors, you will work on perhaps the most important process in good writing: how to revise early messy drafts into finished products.

No single course can teach you how to write. It is a skill you will spend a life-time developing. Your first-year writing seminar will provide you with a foundation for your future by teaching you to approach writing in a new way-as a process of exploring and articulating ideas.

What Will I Learn in My First-Year Inquiry Seminar?

Inquiry Seminars are courses specially designed for first-year students, which will introduce you to the methods and topics of study within a particular academic discipline or field. You might learn, for example, how religious historians approach the Bible, how political scientists analyze questions of justice, how geologists reconstruct the history of our planet, or how communications scholars analyze media programming. Each Inquiry Seminar fulfills either a general university, departmental, program, or school requirement.

Inquiry seminars also emphasize the academic skills that are at the center of the First-Year Experience Program. Working with other first-year students in a small-class setting that promotes active, seminar-style learning, you will practice fundamental skills of literacy, thinking and community as they operate within that particular discipline.

• Thinking: You will learn how critical reflection functions in an academic field. For instance, what types of questions do chemists ask when they analyze data? How do anthropologists use a variety of theoretical approaches to understand a culture's practices, and what are the assumptions, strengths and weaknesses of these various approaches? What counts as a valid interpretation in literary study?
• Literacy: You will practice the skills of active, critical reading and effective communication. How does one read a text in what philosophers call a "charitable" fashion? How does rhetorical theory help us design more effective oral presentations, or engage in more fruitful discussions? How do historians craft arguments and cite evidence in their writing?
• Community: You will practice learning as a collaborative, communal endeavor. How does a literature classroom function as a community of interpreters? How does group problem solving work in a mathematics classroom? How do biologists collaborate in lab work? How do sociologists set up collaborative research projects?

These courses will help you make the transition to the disciplinary courses you will take in fulfilling your core requirements and your major - and they provide an excellent opportunity to check out an area of study you might want to major in!

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