What Students Say about Loyola’s First-Year Seminars
- "One of the most interesting classroom experiences of my life."
- "This class confirmed all of expectations of Loyola. We formed a family within the classroom and ensured lifelong friendships."
- "This course made us go out of our comfort zones and think about things we never did in high school."
- "The course helped me focus in on what I want to do in life."
- "This course made me realize that I love Loyola and have picked the right school!"
- "I loved this class because it is more about thinking than about anything else."
- "It was an exciting and eye-opening cultural experience."
- "What I really liked about this class is that we had the chance to discover the answers to the questions ourselves."
First-Year Experience at Loyola
When you enroll at Loyola, you become a member of an academic, spiritual, and social community where learning happens in the classrooms, in the residence halls, in the student center, in the community, and beyond. Loyola’s First-Year Experience program helps you become part of this rich living and learning community.
First-Year Seminars
The First-Year Experience program is anchored in small academic seminars taught by leading teacher-scholars. The seminars introduce you to college-level intellectual inquiry and Loyola’s Jesuit tradition under the overarching theme “thinking critically, acting justly.” The courses are interdisciplinary and focus on questions of enduring value in the context of subject matter ranging from medieval monsters to protest and pop music, from violence in the media to American dreams.
All first-year students take a first-year seminar, in either the fall or spring semester.
Living and Learning Together
First-year learning experiences don’t stop at the classroom doors. Your seminar is part of a thematic cluster in which students from four or five other seminars live together in the residence halls and get together for out-of-class events, lectures, concerts, or other activities. The learning clusters extend the experience of the seminar to a larger group of students and help you get to know more of your fellow first-year classmates through shared intellectual and social experiences. If you’re not living in the residence halls, don’t worry! You’ll still be part of a learning cluster and involved in all of its activities.
The New Orleans Experience
Each year, many of our seminars focus on aspects of New Orleans culture, literature, history, and environment. But even if you don’t enroll in one of these seminars, learning about our unique city will be part of your first-year experience. Throughout the year, our Center for the Study of New Orleans sponsors events—lectures by scholars on New Orleans, panel discussions, musical events, film series—and you’ll attend some of these events with the students in your learning cluster.
A Sampling of Our 2010-2011 Seminars and Learning Clusters »