First-Year Seminars

Each new first-year student's fall schedule includes a first-year seminar. School of Music students and Honor Scholars are assigned to their seminars. In their course requests, Asbury College of Liberal Arts students list 10 seminars they are interested in taking.

The First-Year Seminar is a small, discussion-based class that ensures that the students and faculty instructor get to know one another well.  The small class size also fosters good academic discussions in which all students feel welcome to participate in the exploration of ideas, careful reading of texts, and critical thinking.  In most cases, the instructor for the course is also the students' academic advisor until they declare a major

Each first-year seminar in the Asbury College of Liberal Arts is writing intensive. School of Music first-year seminars address requirements for School of Music degrees. First-Year Seminars introduce students to skills essential for success at DePauw generally, but focus on writing and oral communication specifically given their centrality to everything we do. The course begins nurturing essential skills in writing, thinking and speaking with the expectation that these skills will be reinforced and further developed throughout students’ time at DePauw both in courses specific to the writing curriculum and in broader general education and departmental/program curricula.

First-Year Seminars are not designed to be the first step toward a specific major or career. Other introductory courses taken in the first two years allow for exploration of possible fields of study or majors.  Instead, first-year seminars are designed to open new areas of interest and to allow students to think in new ways.  Most seminars are interdisciplinary, introducing ideas and ways of thinking from more than one discipline (e.g., political science and environmental studies or chemistry and forensics).