First-Year Seminar
First-year seminar courses, the backbone of the First-Year Experience at UMW, introduce students to the pursuit of intellectual inquiry. Seminars are designed to foster interaction with outstanding faculty members while exploring nontraditional topics in nontraditional ways. One first-year seminar is required during your first semester on campus as part of UMW’s general education program. (Transfer students are not required to take a first-year seminar.) Specific topics will vary from course to course, but all promise…
- college as you imagined it: a life of the mind taught by faculty
- small classes, capped at 15 students each
- active, discussion-based formats
- exploration of primary texts rather than textbooks
- critical examination of the class literature
- development of writing and speaking skills
Common Experience (Read)
The Common Experience is a shared academic experience for students, faculty, staff, and community members the week prior to the start of classes. Previous Common Experiences have focused on discussions of texts, plays, and podcasts. This year the Common Experience is built around Living on Auto-Pilot, an episode from PBS’s Hacking Your Mind series. Living on Auto-Pilot. This documentary illustrates the many ways our “auto-pilot” mental processes can cause us to respond automatically or with bias, and offers suggestions for engaging our “slow-thinking” system to make more reasoned, less biased decisions. We rely on our auto-pilot systems to make quick decisions, but these systems can be duped by advertisers. And, auto-pilot thinking is influenced by implicit biases, which can lead to biased actions. We’ll use this documentary and implicit bias tests to launch deep academic dialogues where you can share what you learned about how our minds work and how our decisions can contain unconscious bias.