All Allegheny students choose from a variety of seminar topics to complete three FS (First-year/Sophomore) courses in their first two years. The FS program encourages careful listening and reading, thoughtful speaking and writing, critical thinking, and reflective academic planning. Students develop communication and research skills useful for generating, exploring, defending, and challenging ideas.
Although students will typically have different instructors for their FS courses, the three courses form a continuum that moves from general to discipline-specific communication. In conjunction with the Junior Seminar and Senior Project, the FS courses prepare students to communicate effectively complex technical ideas and arguments to a variety of audiences in written and spoken form. All FS courses emphasize attention to audience and the importance of understanding conventions of communication within a particular context.
