For fall 2023, all incoming College of Engineering and Applied Science students will take a first-year seminar course as part of the Engineering Residential Community. The seminar course will be designed to provide a common, rigorous academic experience and cultivate an academic identity, establish a culture built on core values of inclusivity, personal agency, resilience, and belonging/mattering. First-year seminar courses are a high-impact practice that has been shown to increase student persistence and retention.  

A faculty working group comprised of the faculty who will be teaching the course will design the course content. The one-credit course will have a unique structure:

  • It will engage a three-credit meeting pattern for the first third of the semester, taking students from move-in through their first round of midterms. This is the most critical time in their adjustment to college.
  • Section size will be limited to 20 students per section — approximately 48 sections — to provide a small-class experience with peers.
  • Faculty from the Herbst Program of Engineering, Ethics & Society will teach many of these sections as part of their normal teaching load, and the remaining sections will be taught by other CEAS faculty as either part of their normal teaching load or as a one-time overload.
  • The course will count as lower-division Humanities and Social Science credit. 

Students in the Engineering Honors and the Global Engineering Residential Academic Programs will continue to have their own required three-credit courses that cover the same materials.

After the fall 2023 semester, a faculty working group will evaluate the success of the course and make recommendations for the long-term structure of a common first-year course for all incoming students.