I came into Swarthmore expecting to major in some combination of biology and environmental studies. I am now an Honors history major with an Honors minor in theater and a course minor in environmental studies. Although I didn’t fully abandon my passion for science, I experienced a major shift in my interests during my first year that pushed me more towards the history of science, and I can attribute much of my change in interests to the first-year seminar I took my freshman fall. It pushed me in new ways, opened my eyes to a kind of intellectual work that I had never engaged with before, and introduced me to people who are still some of my closest friends today.
First-year seminars are seminars at Swat that are only available to first-year students. You can take them in either your fall or spring semester of your freshman year, but they are capped at 12 students, and designed to help first-years adapt to seminar-style discussion predominates many courses at Swarthmore. They help you develop confidence with college-level reading and writing skills in a supportive atmosphere, enabling you to feel more confident entering higher-level courses going forward.
I decided to enroll in HIST 001E First-Year Seminar: Global History of Science taught by Professor BuYun Chen. I wanted to complete a social science credit my first semester and I knew vaguely that the history of science could be an interesting field for me, so I thought, why not take it? It was a Tuesday and Thursday class from 1:15-2:30pm. We read five or six books throughout the semester, wrote three essays, and led class discussion in pairs twice. The class was small, only about 8-10 people, and it was my first experience in a real college seminar. Now don’t get me wrong – it was hard. I had never had to do so much reading for a class before, and we had to write notes into a shared google doc before every class to share with our classmates, so once I was done annotating the book chapters I had to go back through and pull out ideas to add to the google doc – hopefully ones other people hadn’t already said. I got some of my worst essay grades I’ve ever gotten in that class, and at times during class discussions I just felt like I was getting more and more confused without understanding anything. But I loved it. I developed better note-taking and close reading strategies I still use today. I loved connecting with other student’s ideas in class and building ideas together. I loved reading complicated academic texts and going to office hours to talk about what I didn’t understand. I loved reading the last book of the semester and realizing I had a lot more to say about it and was much better at saying it than I had been at the start of the semester 14 weeks ago. In comparison to the STEM courses I was taking that semester, where I felt myself getting less and less engaged over the weeks, I got more and more excited to go to my history of science class. By the end of semester, I knew that my interests were more aligned with the history of science than with the science itself, and my work in Global History of Science gave me the confidence to take a course on the history of cigarettes in the spring, which allowed me to do research with my professor over the summer.
I think every first-year seminar is a little bit of a leap of faith. They challenge you in new ways and force you to think deeply about the learning material you’re engaging with. But if you pick wisely, they can teach you so much about yourself, your interests, and maybe even change the course of your academic career.