The First Year Seminar

When my friends and I pour over the seemingly endless class options for the coming semester during advance registration, it’s not uncommon for our attention to be caught by a cool sounding title or a class description, only to realize that the class in question is a First Year Seminar.

Offered in rotating topics every semester, First Year Seminars are small classes (usually capped around 18 students) open only to first year students. They are in many was designed to give first years an idea of what it’s like to be in an upper-level seminar. Many of my friends appreciated the opportunity to partake in a small, discussion-based class during a semester otherwise filled mostly with larger intro classes.

The freshman seminar I took remains one of my favorite classes I’ve taken at Penn. It was a political science course called The Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelical Christians in US Politics, where we focused on both the historical and contemporary roles of evangelicals in the American political sphere. I really enjoyed having long and incredibly engaging discussions about the readings and about current events in a small setting. I was able to form close relationships with both my peers (some of whom are still close friends) and my professor, which was really valuable to me in my first semester at Penn. Since the class was on Zoom during the pandemic, the professor brought in guest speakers most weeks, including the authors of our assigned books so we could hear from them about their research and their perspectives. Not only did the class expose me to a college seminar environment, but it also helped understand how social scientists, and specifically political scientists, think about important questions in the field and conduct research. It definitely reinforced my interest in studying political science.

Moral of the story: take advantage of these classes while you can!

- Lucy K.