First-Year Seminars

About The Seminars

Current FYS descriptions can be found here.

First-Year Seminars offer every first-year student an opportunity to participate in a course structured around intensive writing, independent research, and small group discussion. The First-Year Seminar program serves four purposes. First, by means of a uniform writing requirement, the seminar stresses the importance of written expression in all disciplines. Second, it provides an attractive and exciting supplement to the usual introductory survey. Third, it guarantees each first-year student at least one small course. Fourth, the program engages each first-year student in the research process, offering an early experience of the scholarship that fuels Dartmouth's upper-level courses.

First-Year Seminars are offered in many different departments under the course number "07.XX", for example, WRIT 07.02.

Enrollment in a First-Year Seminar is limited to 16 students. Enrollment above the limit is never allowed in a First-Year Seminar course. Open slots are first-come, first-served. No waiting lists are maintained.

Effective AY21-22, First-Year Seminars do not serve in partial satisfaction of the General Education requirements such as distributive requirements or the world culture requirement.

Guidelines for Students

The First-Year seminar is a course designed to sharpen students' writing and research skills. Students should therefore expect to develop strategies for researching, developing, and structuring their ideas, and to regularly revise their work, frequently in response to comments from their professors and classmates.

In their seminars, students will familiarize themselves with the Dartmouth library system and with proper citation protocols. (See Sources.)

Students who find it difficult to meet the course requirements should talk with their professors. Tutors at the Writing Center, are also available to help students with their writing and research needs.

Course Outcomes

The First-Year Seminar models the academic life, in particular by its seminar nature, a hallmark of which is strong faculty-student interaction. The First-Year Seminar engages students in the integrated activities of reading, research, discussion, and composition around a designated subject. At its core, this course is designed to provide first-year students with opportunities for both sustained, rigorous investigation of a topic and close faculty-student interaction. Students will gain a deeper appreciation of the role of writing in scholarly investigation, as they refine, adapt, and expand their abilities to absorb, synthesize and construct arguments in close-knit community.

Accordingly, the FYS is both a writing course and a course that works with a particular disciplinary content; the writing engages the content and enables deep learning of that content, and vice versa. "Writing" in this course is thus understood within the context of advanced learning--as a process that requires students to balance their acquisition of new knowledge and contextualized understanding (gained through reading, research, and discussion) against the challenges of synthesizing and re-presenting that understanding in ways that suit their current context.

In order to achieve that balance, the seminar helps students recognize analogies between the work of absorbing complex content--for example, through reading and research inquiry-- and that of constructing it. In a seminar on medical imaging, for example, students could analyze how the most effective presentation of MRI data is similar to and differs from the most effective presentation of data in a scientific academic paper. Likewise, students in a history or sociology seminar can draw from their classroom analysis of historical evidence to find new methods for evaluating their own evidence in a class essay, project, or presentation. This integration of advanced learning, inquiry, and writing is the foundation of the course.

While this document separates out the capabilities students should develop in the course in order to help identify them, we acknowledge that they are all interrelated in the everyday reality of the course.

Academic Process

In the First-Year Seminar context, students are engaged in reading (both course assigned reading and research reading) as a core component of writing well on a particular topic. Likewise, students will write--both formally and informally--in order to process and engage with their reading. In both respects, reading and research are integral to the seminar's writing goals, and vice versa.

Students will demonstrate the ability to perform close and critical readings.
Students will demonstrate the ability to consider critically the motives and methods of scholarship and the relationship between them.
Students will demonstrate the ability to distinguish opinions and beliefs from researched claims and evidence and recognize that kinds of evidence will vary from subject to subject. For instance, some fields focus inquiry on quantitative data while others work more commonly with quoted, textual evidence.
Students will demonstrate the ability to ask disciplinarily appropriate questions of the material and recognize when lines of inquiry fall outside of disciplinary boundaries.
Students will demonstrate the ability to evaluate, credit, and synthesize sources.

Composing and Producing

As writers in the First-Year Seminar, students will practice capabilities related to entry-level thinking, research, and writing in a particular field. Specifically, they will develop the flexibility necessary to recognize that different academic domains require their own approaches appropriate to the context. Since the problem of "how to write effectively" is dependent on what they are writing about, writing is not a separate "skill" that can be fully separated from disciplinary context. Understanding this need for flexibility, students will approach future course writing with a productive mindset, one that will allow them to make rhetorical adjustments as needed.

Students will demonstrate the ability to take a piece of writing through the process of revision in order to advance their ideas and communicate more effectively with their readers.
Students will demonstrate the ability to discern the assignment's intended audience and objectives and respond appropriately.
Students will demonstrate the ability to identify the disciplinary context for different kinds of writing, including both informal writing (like scientific note taking) and formal writing (like a research paper in Government).
Students will demonstrate the ability to construct a paper consistent with expectations of the discipline, including an appropriate organization, style, voice, and tone.
Students will demonstrate the ability to perform critical readings of their own writing and the writing of others.
Students will demonstrate the ability to proofread.

Interacting in the Course

These include capabilities related to interacting intellectually in a seminar through informal and formal activities:

Students will demonstrate the ability to collaborate with others as they work on intellectual projects (reading, writing, researching, presenting...).
Students will demonstrate the ability to prepare appropriately to participate effectively in class discussion.
Students will demonstrate the ability to follow discussions, oral arguments, and presentations, noting main points or evidence and tracking threads through different comments. Further, students will be able to challenge and offer substantive replies to others' arguments, comments, and questions, while remaining sensitive to the original speaker and the classroom audience.
Students will demonstrate the ability to discuss and debate with an appreciation for complex social and cultural sensibilities.

Past Couse Descriptions

For course descriptions for the current or upcoming term, view the First-Year Seminar Descriptions from the Office of the Registrar. FYS course descriptions for the coming term are posted shortly before registration opens for that term. First-Year Seminars are not offered in fall term.

The First-Year Seminar course descriptions pages from the Registrar's website for the most recent years are archived below. If you need a First-Year Seminar description from terms prior to those posted here, please contact us at Writing.Program@dartmouth.edu.

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First-Year Seminars

About The Seminars

Guidelines for Students

Course Outcomes

Academic Process

Composing and Producing

Interacting in the Course

Past Couse Descriptions