First-Year Seminar
Designed to provide you with a unique space to connect with essential resources, build academic skills, and engage with a supportive community from day one.
The First-Year Seminar (FYS) program connects you with the liberal arts values and practices that are the heart of undergraduate education at University of Redlands. FYS serves as your home base, offering you space to confront increased responsibility, learn from setbacks and mistakes, and develop personal strategies to succeed.
Throughout the program, your FYS professor and peer advisor will connect you to the resources and skills you need to thrive, while demystifying college expectations during your transition from high school to college. Your FYS professor will serve as your initial academic advisor, helping you choose courses and chart an academic path. Meanwhile, your peer advisor, a current student nominated by faculty and trained in academic peer mentoring, will provide insights on navigating the university from a student's perspective.
You'll meet your FYS professor and peer advisor during New Student Orientation. The FYS program will continue throughout the fall semester, providing a uniting and unique experience as you begin your college journey at Redlands.
Past First-Year Seminars
Explore a selection of seminars from previous years that engaged first-year students in meaningful learning and discussion. Seminars planned for 2025 are coming soon.
Description: In this course, we will discuss how representations of imagined communities (science fiction novels and film) are intertwined with ideas about gender, sexuality, and racialized identities. One of the primary theoretical concepts we will discuss is “intersectionality,” or how race, gender, sexuality, and class intertwine in representation and experience. We will read several novels focused on dystopian or utopian imagined communities, both historical and contemporary. (Some possibilities include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Octavia Butler's Kindred and Parable of the Sower). We will also analyze contemporary science fiction in film. (Some possibilities include Aliens, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and Black Panther.) The course will include the opportunity to create your own utopian community “design” through a creative final project. Reading titles may change before you receive the final syllabus in the fall.
Description: Life is a succession of journeys, including the one you are embarking on right now as a first-year college student. Through reading (both fiction and non-fiction), writing, and discussion, we will explore spiritual and physical journeys as a tool for personal growth. Whether the journey's outcome is triumphant or tragic, we will reflect on the lessons learned on each journey and the impact of those lessons on our own wellness, mindfulness, and the formation of a personal life code.
Description: Civic ecology is the study of community-driven environmental stewardship practices, their outcomes for individuals, communities, and ecosystems, and their interactions with the governance institutions and social-ecological systems in which they take place. This course is designed to explore the people, places, and practices that restore nature and neighborhoods through a community learning service project. By engaging people in working with nature, civic ecology practices foster psychological and physical wellbeing. By reflecting local history, cultures, and aspects of the built and natural environment, civic ecology practices foster a sense of place. Experiential activities will include field trips to local hiking trails and trail maintenance, working on local urban farms and a historical streambed that runs through campus.
Description: This course uses literature and film to examine critical perspectives, traits, and skills for leaders in fields such as business, not-for-profit organizations, government, healthcare, and education. Why does a leader do what they do? How does a leader make decisions? What are the thoughts and feelings of a leader as they decide – and after they decide? We examine questions such as these through observing and analyzing the inner worlds and experiences of others as they face challenging, complex leadership decisions. Students practice leadership and decision-making skills such as determining critical frameworks, problem definition and analysis, and scrutiny of the relationship of one’s foundational presumptions and the decision outcomes.
Description: Education is a public good, recognized as essential to a well-functioning democratic society. However, there’s no real agreement about what education should look like and who should receive it. What should be covered? How should we facilitate and measure learning? Whose experiences and perspectives should be centered? What does it mean for education to be accessible considering such human diversity as race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender, sexuality? We’ll explore these questions and how they’ve been answered through readings and reflections on our own experiences. We’ll focus on education in the U.S., and we’ll include public education in other nations and educational systems other than mainstream U.S. public education. Students with experience in non-U.S. schools or alternative education in the U.S. are welcome, and anyone with an interest in better understanding their own experiences in education or interested in working toward educational equity in the future will find this course meaningful.
Description: The pyramids were built by aliens. The Egyptian, Mayan, and Incan civilizations are derived from the lost city of Atlantis. Ancient North America was populated by a lost tribe of Israelites. There are a lot of fantastic ideas about human history, but how do we sort out the good from the bad? For that matter, how do we sort out competing knowledge claims on any topic? In this class, we’ll consider some of the more outlandish ideas about the past and see how they stand up to scrutiny, using this as an opportunity to build up our critical thinking skills. In archaeology, as in life, how you know what you know can be as important as knowing what isn’t so.