First-Year Foundations

First-Year Writing

First-Year Writing courses work from the belief that writing is an essential tool in every discipline -- one that challenges you to develop meaningful, nuanced questions and complex ideas. Working closely with your instructor and peers, you will learn to translate those complex ideas into clear, precise, and persuasive essays. You will analyze a variety of novels, myths, memoirs, and short stories, along with other historical texts and scholarly articles that enrich your literary and cultural analyses.

First-Year Seminar

First-Year Seminars provide the opportunity to practice your critical reading and writing skills while learning about an interdisciplinary special topic designed by a Barnard professor. Readings range across genres and historical periods, drawing from a variety of literary texts, films, art, performance pieces, data, historical documents, and scholarly articles. Through generative class discussions and writing assignments, First-Year Seminars initiate you into the intellectual community of the college. Students choose either a Special Topics seminar or a section of Reacting to the Past.