The course uses various books and movies to help students explore and discuss their values and life goals. The topics include such personal, social, and global issues as popular culture, growing up and family, spirituality and the inner life, the workplace, personal identity and integrity, the environment, poverty and social justice, and community. In past semesters, the class has read such books as Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Carl Jung's autobiography, and the movies have included Ordinary People, Wall Street, Places in the Heart, and Babette's Feast.
Students keep an extensive journal, in which they reflect on the issues raised by the course.
Because the Freshman Seminar is a thoroughly interdisciplinary course, it does not fulfill any specific major or General Education requirements. But its very breadth makes it an excellent introduction to the whole process of college-level academic inquiry. Everyone who takes the Freshman Seminar lives in Bergstrom Hall, and everyone who lives in Bergstrom Hall has the shared academic experience of taking the Freshman Seminar. This is an ideal course to integrate with a communally oriented residence hall. The intimacy and sharing of the small-group discussions work best in an environment in which students are friends as well as classmates, and the common academic enterprise makes the hall an unusually vital, intellectually stimulating place.