A few days before Fall 2023 course registration opened for first-year students such as myself, I realized that for the past few months, I had been so focused on getting into college and, after that, moving in, that the chore of actually choosing which classes to take had slipped my mind. I had a meeting with my academic advisor, who gave me two wonderful tips.

Her first tip was that, as somebody who is interested in majoring in medical anthropology, my first anthropology course here at Swarthmore should be ANTH 039C: Food and Culture, which I have thoroughly enjoyed due to the exceptional person it is taught by, Professor Farha Ghannam.

Her second tip was to take a first-year seminar. As is implied by the name, first-year seminars (often abbreviated to “FYSs”) are classes that are offered exclusively to first-year Swarthmore students. All first-year seminars have a maximum enrollment of just twelve students, and act as introductions to the departments they are offered within.

I heeded this advice and began to look at the course descriptions for each of the 21 first-year seminars that were going to be offered during my first semester here at Swarthmore. One course in particular caught my attention: RELG 011: Religion and the Meaning of Life, taught by Professor Ellen Ross. The course description alone demonstrated the wide range of perspectives I would have the opportunity to study throughout the course, listing readings from the letters of Lucretia Mott, a famed Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights activist who was paramount to the founding of Swarthmore College, to a book by Thich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, and peace activist, to the works of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and many more.

I was especially drawn to this course because of the thread it forces its students to weave through each text: what is the meaning of life for this person?

I believed, upon my initial enrollment in the course that I would be gaining a little bit of knowledge about a lot of religions, but I have found that it has given me something even better. This course has given me a great deal of perspective on how religion has shaped the lives of a few individuals and how those individuals have used their religions to create social change.

This course has not only given me so much insight into the nature of various religions and the characters of people who have shaped and/or been shaped by them, but it has also allowed me to directly connect with multiple members of my first-year class. It can be difficult to make solid friends in the chaos of orientation week, and I quickly found my FYS to be part of the solution to that problem. First-year seminars are, perhaps by design, a great antidote to this issue, as they are small enough that you will certainly, at the very least, learn a few names. As for myself, my choice to take this course was one of the wisest I’ve made yet, as I met two of my now-great friends in it.

The next cohort of students who will have the opportunity to take this specific seminar will be the class of 2029, but regardless, there are a great deal of options for FYSs offered every semester at Swarthmore. I would hugely urge any incoming student to consider taking any FYS that sparks their interest.