The Freshman Experience

In an effort to build a sense of community and collegiality among the freshman class, while at the same time giving students the intellectual foundation and skills they need to flourish throughout their lives, the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) at Stevens Institute of Technology presents the ?Freshman Experience.? This experience centers on a sequence of two common courses that every new student at Stevens will take during the first year:

CAL103 Writing and Communications Colloquium

This course empowers students with the written and oral communications skills essential for both university-level academic discourse as well as success outside Stevens in the professional world.  Tailored to the Stevens student, styles of writing and communications include technical writing, business proposals and reports, scientific reports, expository writing, promotional documents and advertising, PowerPoint and team presentations. The course covers the strategies for formulating effective arguments and conveying them to a wider audience. Special attention is given to the skills necessary for professional document structure, successful presentation techniques and grammatical/style considerations.

CAL105, CAL Colloquium: Knowledge, Nature, Culture

This course introduces students to all the humanistic disciplines offered by the College of Arts and Letters: history, literature, philosophy, the social sciences, art, and music. By studying seminal works and engaging in discussions and debates regarding the themes and ideas presented in them, students learn how to examine evidence in formulating ideas, how to subject opinions, both their own, as well those of others, to rational evaluation, and in the end, how to appreciate and respect a wide diversity of opinions and points of view.

Together these courses provide students with the foundation they need to become reflective, critical, expressive and articulate, intellectually confident, and perhaps most important, truly innovative. It also helps them become oriented to college life while giving them a common base across majors and schools, enabling them to build a sense of solidarity and community.

Both courses comprising the Freshman Experience at Stevens will follow common syllabi and make use of the same textbooks, which means that every Stevens Freshman will be reading and discussing the same material, regardless of section or instructor. This will allow students to engage in discussions and debates about the material in virtually every venue of Stevens?from the dining halls to the sports arena. The text for CAL 105 has been published by Stevens and is given to all incoming students as our gift.The Freshman Experience at Stevens