First Year Seminar

What is First Year Seminar?

“First Year Seminar” covers Liberal Education and Citizenship and is the first class you’ll take as an incoming freshman at Flagler College. It is a class about college, the world, and the relationship between them.

What you'll Explore

You’ll explore philosophy and science, business and entertainment. You will stand beside Hamlet as he considers leaving this world, and beside King as he tries to make it better. With Galileo, you will peer through a telescope to see mountains on the moon. With St. Augustine, you will consider the nature of God.

Your Goals

In First Year Seminar, your goal is not to study these topics in depth—that is what all the rest of your classes at Flagler College will be for. Instead, you will look at the big picture; you’ll get a glimpse of the world that all your college classes over the next four years will work to pass on to you.

The class is broken into four parts:

• Part I, in the first weeks of First Year Seminar, is an examination of college itself, and of the meaning of “liberal education.” In this segment, you will see that the skills you’ll need for the next four years are not the same as the skills you learned in high school.
• Part II investigates ancient ideas of knowledge—the oldest ideas that make up the world we live in.
• Part III covers the Scientific Revolution, one of the most important changes in history. You’ll learn how, after this transition, authority was no longer trusted, as human reason took its place.
• Part IV examines a 20^th century crisis of faith—faith not in God but in reason. This part of the course also examines new voices that have their own claims to truth and meaning to contribute to a new, cosmopolitan conversation.