Your First Step at Krieger
All first-year students in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences take two foundational classes as part of the First-Year Foundation (FYF): a First-Year Seminar and Reintroduction to Writing. These courses explore ideas from different disciplines and strengthen students’ ties to each other, faculty, and Baltimore from their first moments on campus.
The 12-person classes are an intimate, low-stress way to begin building community, learning, research, and mentorship that support a student’s academic career.
First-Year Seminars
First-Year Seminars (FYS) welcome students to Johns Hopkins by inviting them to ask and grapple with audacious questions. A lively entryway into the excitement and discovery of a Hopkins education, FYS are designed to spark dynamic discussion and debate while creating close-knit cohorts of first-year students.
Each seminar is taught by a Johns Hopkins faculty member who guides small groups of passionate peers as they take intellectual risks, analyze core texts and big ideas, visit archives or museums, explore research questions, and more.
Every single one of the more than 70 seminars is different, but all are discussion-based with embedded experiential learning. FYS are graded Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory instead of with letter grades.
Talk with your advisor in the summer about the seminars that excite you the most.
Reintroduction to Writing
Reintroduction to Writing (Reintro) classes are offered by the University Writing Program (UWP). The classes help students rethink writing in ways that will help their academic, professional, and personal trajectories.
The classes often include a community element, with students visiting local museums, arts organizations, or archives as they explore multiple genres of writing, including academic writing. Reintroduction to Writing helps you become an agile, curious, creative, and resilient writer.
Most first-year students will take a Reintro class in spring. Talk with your academic advisor about the courses that interest you most.
Choosing your Courses
First-Year Seminars and Reintroduction to Writing classes can be found using JHU Public Course Search. Please be sure to look at the “Special Notes” section for courses and work with your advisor to ensure your selection meets your degree requirements.
How to choose
First-Year Foundation faculty hail from every department and program in the Krieger School, so:
- For FYS: try thinking in questions that excite you, not disciplines. FYS bridge subjects, so many of them reach beyond traditional academic categories. The spirit of FYS is intellectual exploration.
- For Reintro: know that each course has its own unique focus, but all provide academic instruction, multiple types of writing, and some community-involved work.
- For both courses, have fun searching! Then prepare a list of five to 10 classes that spark your intellectual curiosity and that will be offered at a time you can attend.
About our First-Year Foundation
Emerging from the most significant reform to Hopkins’ undergraduate curriculum in 70 years, the mission of the First-Year Foundation is to welcome first-year students warmly and rigorously into the intellectual life of the university, honing the lifelong habits of mind students will need to explore and address the world’s most intractable issues.
Our undertaking is animated by a set of common seminar objectives.
First-Year Seminars Goals
- Cultivate intellectual curiosity and community
- Establish foundational critical thinking skills and habits of mind
- Foster academic belonging while cultivating civil discourse across disciplinary interests and backgrounds
- Promote faculty-student interaction and mentorship
Reintroduction to Writing Goals
- Identify and employ iterative writing processes to generate ideas and draft texts, review and revise your own and others
- Integrate critical thinking strategies into your reading, writing, and speaking
- Analyze, choose, and apply rhetorical strategies and genre conventions to inform or persuade specific audiences
- Critically reflect on relationships among language, standardization, power, and justice; explore how languages and their varieties inform writing, speaking, and interpretative choices