First-Year Seminars are completely optional, but two years later I’m still thinking about mine.

As a new college student life can be confusing, overwhelming, and scary. On top of these new range of emotions, you still have to register for class. Then when you actually arrive on campus in the fall, the fear of having to make friends is a very real reality for many incoming freshmen. However, Harvard offers what we call First-Year Seminars.

 First-Year Seminars at Harvard are classes offered only for first-year students. You can take one either in the fall or spring semester, pick from a range of different topics, and the grading scale is pass/fail. These seminars are completely optional and are not required for meaningful first-year experience.

First-Year Seminars are capped at 15 students, so it is a great intimate, low stress, and fun way to enter your four years at Harvard College. I personally took my First-Year Seminar in the fall. I wanted to take a class I knew would only consist of people who were also in my year, so I could hopefully make new friends. Little did I know that this class, two years later as I am a rising junior would still be the best class I have ever taken at Harvard. 

My First-Year Seminar was called #Adulting and taught by Dr. Nancy Hill. It was the perfect class to take my freshman fall, as I was indeed adulting. The class covered material such as the transition from adolescence to adulthood. It was an extremely eye-opening experience that not everyone needs to follow one path or timeline, especially here at Harvard. 

Alongside learning about the transition to adulthood and how our brain develops I was also surrounded by ten peers who were also going through the same things as me. It was a very welcoming experience and made the transition to college and Harvard’s curriculum much more manageable.

Furthermore, #Adulting was just one of the many topics that Harvard offers in its First-Year Seminar Program. Another seminar they offered this past year was Life of an Iceberg by Professor Fiamma Straneo. At the end of the year the class went on a trip together to Iceland. In another First-Year Seminar, the class builds boats the entire semester and at the end gets to test them out in the Malkin Athletic Center swimming pool. 

Throughout all of these courses, students are learning interesting topics such as climate change, art history, architecture, psychology, etc. It is a little taste of future classes you may choose to explore later on in your Harvard journey and friendships that may last a lifetime.