First Year Seminar

The First Year Seminar is crucial to the UHCL experience. PSYC 1100 Learning Frameworks (First-Year Seminar) is a course designed to promote the intellectual readiness that ensures students thrive in college.

Seminar students and faculty engage in a shared process of inquiry around the broad, interdisciplinary topic of civic engagement in a learning community combined with a core curriculum course. Through their investigation of this topic, students are explicitly taught how to engage in skilled critical thinking. By attaching these critical thinking skills to real world problems, students become convinced of the importance of critical thinking to their own educations and lives. 

These small seminar-style classes are taught by experienced faculty who use varied and engaging pedagogies to help students make the transition to academic life at UHCL. Faculty achieve this objective by developing creative and critical thinking abilities, cultivating effective communication skills, and introducing students to a variety of research tools.

The Seminar also promotes intellectual readiness by helping students build and find the resources which will enable them to overcome the challenges they may face as students, by providing many opportunities to make connections with faculty and other students, by discovering the wide range of resources UHCL provides its students, and by becoming active members of the university and local community.