<p>Any very interesting first year writing seminars?
Or ones that don't have <em>that</em> much writing to them?</p>
<p>The Obama one looks pretty good. Regardless of your politics, his story, historical significance, and social impact are fascinating. Plus, I haven’t had the chance to read Dreams from My Father yet, so this would give me a good excuse to do that. But, yeah, I’d like some thoughts from FWS alum as well. The ballot submission starts in three days!</p>
<p>find whichever professors u can on ratemyprofessor</p>
<p>or if they’re not there try to look up as much as you can on their research/studies on their department website. </p>
<p>i think there is a minimum of 5 papers to each seminar.</p>
<p>Most FWS’s are taught by TAs, so you probably won’t find many FWS instructors on ratemyprof. I’d recommend going through the brochure and picking out all of the seminars that sound interesting to you and fit into your schedule, and then do what campuscsi said - Google the instructor and see if they have a website of some sort from which you can form a general impression.</p>
<p>Also, I think the minimum number of papers is 6, but the word “paper” is flexible…some of mine were as little as 2 pages long, and some were creative assignments. Depends on your class and instructor.</p>
<p>Don’t automatically discount English Dept. FWS’s either. I got really lucky. Mine was a grad student who was really awesome at teaching and really relaxed with grading. Only did 5 papers, and 2 of them were completion grades. </p>
<p>Plus he was willing to help you and let you rewrite papers and resubmit for a better grade.</p>
<p>Not only did I come out with an A-, my best grade I made all year, but I felt I really did improve my writing much moreso than any other english class I’ve ever had.</p>
<p>TBH you really can’t tell that much from the title. My FWS freshman year was on apocalyptic fiction which started off great (we read Galapagos, Oryx and Crake, etc. and also watched 28 Weeks Later) but sort of petered out. The ENGL ones tend to have more writing involved but you can never really be sure - plus a lot of the ENGL ones tend to be more interesting.</p>