There's more than one way to find success in college and the path to getting there is different for every student. Our goals in this course are to connect with fellow students and the instructor as you become a contributing member of the community, both at UMass and beyond; start planning your individual academic goals and pathways toward achieving them; explore the different majors in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and start thinking like a social scientist.

There's more than one way to find success in college and the path to getting there is different for every student. Our goals in this course are to connect with fellow students and the instructor as you become a contributing member of the community, both at UMass and beyond; start planning your individual academic goals and pathways toward achieving them; explore the different majors in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and start thinking like a social scientist.

There's more than one way to find success in college and the path to getting there is different for every student. Our goals in this course are to connect with fellow students and the instructor as you become a contributing member of the community, both at UMass and beyond; start planning your individual academic goals and pathways toward achieving them; explore the different majors in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and start thinking like a social scientist.

There's more than one way to find success in college and the path to getting there is different for every student. Our goals in this course are to connect with fellow students and the instructor as you become a contributing member of the community, both at UMass and beyond; start planning your individual academic goals and pathways toward achieving them; explore the different majors in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and start thinking like a social scientist.

There's more than one way to find success in college and the path to getting there is different for every student. Our goals in this course are to connect with fellow students and the instructor as you become a contributing member of the community, both at UMass and beyond; start planning your individual academic goals and pathways toward achieving them; explore the different majors in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and start thinking like a social scientist.

There's more than one way to find success in college and the path to getting there is different for every student. Our goals in this course are to connect with fellow students and the instructor as you become a contributing member of the community, both at UMass and beyond; start planning your individual academic goals and pathways toward achieving them; explore the different majors in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and start thinking like a social scientist.

Everyone wants to be happy and satisfied with their life. But what does this mean? How do you obtain happiness, wellbeing, and satisfaction, or if you have those things, how did you get them? Can we identify practices in our daily lives that will bring us more of these valuable mental states? This first-year seminar will explore both the science and the philosophy of the good life. We will investigate the nature of the good life through philosophical readings, and we will attempt to improve our lives through the application of psychological theory.

When we talk about "artificial intelligence," what do we mean? The idea is everywhere. It recommends playlists, optimizes shipping networks, and even crashes a few cars. We've been writing about it in fiction for decades, but those texts talk about much more than just AI. Exploring the intelligences we make is a way of exploring the intelligences that we are. In fiction, robots and sentient computers are blank slates that allow us to dream up other ways of being or reimagine ourselves, revising everything from sexuality to mortality to humor. Writers from Mary Shelley to Philip K.

Do you think UMass buildings like the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, the Campus Center, and Southwest are ugly? In this class, we will explore the history of Brutalism and how you can learn to love (or at least not hate?) these not-so-gentle giants. You will also learn where the word "Brutalism" came from, how the term is a poor translation (or happy accident, depending on the way you look at it) of the original French beton brut (literally "raw concrete"), and the legacy Modernism left behind, aesthetically and politically.

In this first-year seminar, we will read about and discuss many of these issues that are so pervasive in our daily life that we rarely pay attention to them. The hope is that we can go through our time in college paying a little bit more attention, making more intentional choices, rather than simply floating downstream.