First established at Trinity in 1969, the First-Year Program (now known as First-Year Seminar Program) consists of small, discussion-rich classes, created out of a faculty member’s passion for a subject. Each seminar instructor serves as the students’ pre-major academic adviser. Seminars also include a First Year Academic Peer Mentor: an upper year student who attends classes and serves as a peer advisor. Each seminar emphasizes training in three essential skills: writing, discussion, and critical analysis.
In 1986, the Curriculum Committee reviewed the state of First Year seminars and drew up a loosely defined mission statement for the program, which detailed the basic tenets of the seminars as described above. In 1998, this mission statement was expanded to accommodate the desire among faculty and administration to create a larger program for first year students which would integrate residential and academic areas of the College.
President Evan Dobelle’s Strategic Plan of 1993 revamped the First-Year Program in 1995 as a way to facilitate healthy crossover between students' academic and residential experiences. Renaming the program “First Year Seminar” was among these changes. Bringing new learning beyond the classroom became the focus of the Program under Dobelle’s initiative, and the clustered seminars became the incubators for the future of Trinity’s interdisciplinary student body. Jack Wagget, the Associate Dean of Faculty at the time, praised the First-Year Program’s “intent to judge the freshman experience as a time of problems, growth, anxiety, and learning in a varied and demanding atmosphere. It is an orderly way to help students adjust more comfortably to the value of a learning community.” In order to facilitate the expansion and strengthening of learning communities beyond the classroom, students in the same seminar cluster were placed in the same dorms, along with their respective upper-year mentors.
Soon after its inception, the First Year Seminars received backlash from students, who criticized aspects of its organization and its efficacy in achieving the goals toward which it claimed to be oriented. A long opinion piece by Matthew Prince critiquing the program entitled “The Failure of the First Year Program” was published in the Trinity Tripod in October 1995, just a few months after the first semester of the new seminars had commenced. Prince saw the choice to offer the older mentors a $1500 stipend and academic credit as a way to attract upper-year students to an ultimately unattractive and isolating position that, rather than being the volunteer work that was proposed, became more similar to an RA (Resident Assistant) job.
The First Year Seminar Program continues today, with 97% of the student body participating in it as they enter the College.
A Study of the Trinity College First Year Seminar Program (2003) by Pia Bunton.
Trinity College Bulletin 1995-1996 (Catalogue Issue), 1995.
Trinity Tripod, 11-07-1995.
Trinity Tripod, 09-05-1995.
Trinity Tripod, 01-24-1995.