This First Year Seminar looks at the challenges facing first year students. This course looks at how students should approach university life, prepare for classes, and develop professional relationships with peers, professors, and advisors.

We'll practice the core college skill of sustained attention by going totally free of digital tools--phones, computers, screens etc--for 50 minutes. We'll do this for a few minutes at first, and build up over the semester to the full 50 minutes. How will we fill the time without any digital tools? By talking, listening, observing, drawing, walking outside (or alternatives if you can't walk), being quiet, reading and writing on paper, and most importantly, getting used to being bored.

Did you know our brains are constantly changing and we can shape how we learn? Let's take a deep dive into how our brains work and how we can best harness the power of our neurons and synapses to support learning and success in college. In this class, we'll learn about metacognition and how students can use this to shape their learning.

Ethics is often taught as separate from other things, a calculation that we make in special circumstances. This course will discuss the "everyday ethics" that we all manage: do we return the shopping cart? Tell the cashier at the grocery store they made a mistake in our favor? Gossip? Sneak away from a little fender bender in the campus parking lot? Through selected readings, and other media, we'll understand and discuss how just about every decision has an ethical component and whether and how to incorporate that in our daily activities.

This course is a discussion where we explore the use of music in sporting events, how these came about, the role music plays, and when it intersects with current events. This ranges the gamut of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and college fight songs to the Star Spangled Banner and walk-up songs in Major League Baseball.

Have you ever wondered what goes into a live musical performance? This course establishes and synthesizes foundational knowledge about music, the act of creating it, and the people who make it, with the purposes of knowledge acquisition and self/group expression. Engagement with live musical performances is a core component of this class, which will be visited by guest performers from the Department of Music & Dance. Students will also make music together in a way that accommodates students of no or highly developed backgrounds in music.

Why are we drawn to watching horror movies, reading scary stories, and visiting haunted houses? What do we get out of scaring ourselves and seeking out artwork that terrifies us? This course will ask these questions while also exploring the cultural meanings behind the horror genre. Throughout the semester, we will watch short films, read short stories, and view art in an effort to better understand the allure of the horror genre in film, literature, and beyond. To guide our studies, we will also look at scholarly articles that analyze the genre and explain the history of horror artwork.

Sequential or "comic" art is so much more than superhero comics! In this seminar we will learn a little bit about non fiction comics as academic and popular texts, both as consumers of texts but also as writers and illustrators. Students will learn the basics of creating non fiction comics of varying lengths, explore the academic applications of sequential art, visit the Comics Based Research Lab at UMass, and finally write their own mini-comic 'zine on a non-fiction topic of their choosing, while also contributing to a collaborative class volume aimed at first year university students.