First-year students greet college life with dynamic seminars
With the immense pressure first-year students feel when starting out at a large college, the University offers a program that tries to ease those overwhelming emotions.
The Byrne Family First-Year Seminars allow first-year students entering the University to take off-the-topic classes formatted on a pass/fail basis.
The courses offered through the seminar program are different from normal classes due to the laid-back atmosphere and small environment, said Director of First-Year Seminars Kathleen Hull, via e-mail correspondence.
"Since the size of the classes only allow a maximum of 20 students, the members of the class and the professor get to know each other," she said. "Because there are no grades, both students and the faculty have the freedom to explore ideas without the pressure of a regular, graded course."
School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Keith Flyer said the seminar he took as a first-year student offered him an opportunity he might not have received without the size and format of the class.
"I [wound] up getting an internship through the seminar," he said. "A visitor to the class was offering an internship at the end of class, so I went up and he said ‘Welcome aboard.'"
The program, which started in the fall of 2007, differs each semester and provides unique and interesting topics for students to choose from, Hull said.
"We offer almost 150 of these small seminars per year, and many of them are very unusual," she said. "Each seminar is created fresh, just for this program, by professors who are interested in working with first-year students and sharing their research passion with the class."
Hull said this year offered an array of different topics, including "Is it Possible to Build an Artificial Person?" and "Kitchen Chemistry and Food Physics: The Science Behind The Food You Eat."
"Students can take a course that piques their interest, whether it fits into their major or not," she said.
Hull's seminar, "Ain't Misbehavin: Civility, Manners and Society," allow students to examine everyday experiences they have at the University.
"We spend a lot of time talking about how we treat one another in everyday life," she said. "We talk about courtesy and how it contributes to the well-being of a community, largely because it's a form of awareness that leads us to do and say things that make others feel happier."
School of Arts and Sciences first-year student Raquel Marucci said the seminar allowed her to be in an atmosphere undaunted by the anxiety of attempting to improve her grade point average.
"The reason I took the seminar was purely for pleasure, just to sort of get away from my other course load," she said. "There's not of a lot of work since the seminar is based on more about how you feel and focused on you."
Mark Schuster, senior dean of students, teaches the seminar "Culture Games: What Do Major Sporting Events Tell Us About Culture and Society?," a course that asks students to critically think about sports through the terms of gender, race, sexuality and others.
"Student's reception to the course has been phenomenal," Schuster said via e-mail correspondence. "Everyone is interested in different sports and experiences, and they all experience American culture through a different lens."
He said the size of the classroom is a positive for first-year students, as it allows for a more personal experience.
"Most first-year students have 200 to 400 students in their classes and won't get to class of 20 or so until they are sophomores or juniors," he said. "It exposes both faculty and a research topic to them in a more intimate way."
Schuster said the seminar also provided a jumping-off point for a 300-level course he is teaching, "Sport in American Culture."
"I used the Byrne Seminars as a laboratory to ‘pilot' to a three-credit, 300-level course that I am teaching this semester," he said. "Teaching the seminars helped me develop the three-credit class based on the Byrne Seminar feedback."
The seminar also inspired the Office of Undergraduate Education and the Office of Student Affairs to launch a year-long dialogue on civility at the University, Hull said.
"I think we'll learn a lot from one another, and it should be fascinating," she said. "Can we be kinder to one another? Can we, at Rutgers, be leaders in making the world a better place? I think we can."
