<p>What are they?</p>
<p>Free time? Lets talk about our feelings as freshmen time? Lets talk about leadership time?</p>
<p>How much do Frosh Seminars actually help you in classes...or is it more of a social thing?</p>
<p>its simply a smaller class i believe opposed to larger lecture styles, possibly only for freshmen</p>
<p>But is it for a specific subject? From what I've heard its not for any subject in particular</p>
<p>maybe im confused about what your talking about but yes i think there in a specific subject just smaller classes</p>
<p>At my school, a lot fsems are also writing intensive, so you get a lot of practice at college writing. My professor also helped us locate sources for papers and use the library and think of paper topics, which are good things to learn quick.</p>
<p>Freshman seminars at my school are a joke. You get an hours worth of credit, and they cover topics likes how to bubble in a scantron, using aromatherapy and yoga to reduce stress and stuff like that. You're required to go to a fine arts event and go to the astronomy observatory (the section I was supposed to be in was going out there from 12 a.m. to 2 a.m. on a school day!). I only lasted a day before dropping it.</p>
<p>where do you go hellokiki?</p>
<p>The ones at UCSD are pretty interesting:</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>We have 2 freshmen seminars that all freshmen are supposed to take their first semester here. One is a 3-unit English class called Freshmen Writing Seminar that varies greatly by the prof who teaches it and the subject of the section. Each section is limited to 15 students and has an emphasis like politics, relationships, dating, women's issues, feminism, religion, etc. and the students write several papers in that area--varying from a number of smaller papers to 1 large paper (one section on life stories requires students to write a 70+ page autobiography).
The other freshmen seminar is called Beginnings: College Development and Experience and is more along the lines of what others have mentioned as far as format but much less about preparing for the academic experience (if you're in college, you really SHOULD ALREADY be able to fill in scantrons, study for tests, not cheat, etc!). It's a lecture-style (~300 students/section) course covering strengths/talents, sexual assault, addiction, men's/women's issues, loving others, racism/racial reconciliation, and diversity. Freshmen are split up into small groups with 2 leaders for each group.
I haven't heard of many colleges using that format, but I know a number have been looking at our program and borrowing aspects of it for their own programs because of its effectiveness and reputation for being one of the top seminar/orientation programs in the nation.</p>
<p>A mid-sized public university in Texas.</p>
<p>they have a few freshman seminars on topics that vary by semester.
they're these little weekly, one-credit classes on subjects like politics, women's studies, philosophy and other stuff. kind of like what the poster two posts above said.</p>
<p>and then there's this mandatory seminar for all freshmen honors students, that you have to take both semesters. it's a regular three credit class and it covers ideas through history. it's very reading and writing intensive.</p>
<p>so, it depends.</p>
<p>Freshman seminars at Dartmouth are fairly hardcore. It meets just like any other class, and each is on a different topic, but all are writing-intensive. They have something between 10 and 20 students in them (mine had 15, anyway). At the end, everyone writes a research paper of between 15-20 pages on average (well, some classes apparently do two shorter ones or something, but i think thats unusual).</p>
<p>It depends. I mean, seminars in general require less work than full-on classes, and you get about half the credit. They're generally very small and very hands-on, or discussion based, or otherwise in-class work as opposed to out-of-class work. I'm taking an astronomy seminar this semester and we usually have about one teacher/professor per 7-8 students, we each get an 8-inch diameter telescope to take onto the roof and fiddle around with, ccd's, laptops... basically a lot of expensive equipment. We have to do very minimal out of class reading/work but we have a three-hour block of commitment one night a week (which I've found myself really looking forward to). But yeah, this is just a general seminar with preference for freshmen (but open to all... I think we have a few grad students in it, even).</p>
<p>My freshman ADVISING seminar, however, was a different story. It was technically about natural disasters, but everyone came for the food. The professor ordered (chinese, italian, you name it) every week and we just kinda sat back (2 hours) and watched some videos, listened to some guest speakers, mostly ate, talked about some environmental issues, whined about difficulty of classes, grading on tests, which classes seemed interesting and which didn't, who had a baseball game when, who went to sleep the earliest/latest. Stuff like that. Yep. About 6 or 7 of us, and we got to take home the leftovers (which was a godsend for first semester freshmen not on a meal plan who are expected to cook for themselves but who never really do). And 6 units of credit. :)</p>