Faculty First Year Seminars 197ENGL9 - A Semester in the Life: Writin

As any journal-keeper or blogger knows, writing can be a good way to work through major changes in your life. And starting college is a major change! For most of you, you?ll be leaving home for the first time ever, moving into a dorm with hundreds of strangers, and beginning a phase of your education that will be more demanding, and more dependent on your own initiative, than ever before. In this course, you?ll use writing to work your way through your first semester at UMass Amherst: recording, describing, narrating, analyzing, interrogating, trouble-shooting, and communicating your experience for yourself and others. We?ll do lots of writing, some reading, a good bit of sharing, and a little blogging. You?ll not only produce a non-fiction record of your first semester here; you?ll get a good introduction to the intellectual and creative life of college itself.

Freshmen Only