Forging Community and Creativity during FYS Showcase and Celebration

On Tuesday, attendees of the First Year Seminar Showcase and Celebration walked into busy rooms filled with first-year students standing and chatting near rows of poster presentations, video collaborations, and art displays. The students alternated between presenting their projects and viewing the work produced by their peers from among the various First Year Seminar courses taken in the first term of the student’s first year.

One group of students from the Imaginary Cities course taught by Autumn Watts, Lecturer in Academic Writing, stood proudly behind a large three-dimensional model they built. It brought to life their idea to use city rooftops as a place for the homeless to shelter, grow food, and receive services. William Moulier ’28, Alesa John ’28, Abigail Thurkauf ’28, and Allie Mienaltowski ’28 spent well over twenty hours building two multi-story buildings, adding details like a plexiglass wall, external staircases, a building-side elevator, a small garden, sheds, and more.

“The big thing we learned in this class is that there are so many ways to use our spaces,” shared Moulier, a Psychology major.

As part of the course, the students considered a significant problem, like homelessness, and imagined how a city’s design could help solve the problem.

“Homelessness is a big problem, particularly in cities with high rent prices. Instead of further crowding, we want to move up,” Moulier explained.

In Tifft Lounge, Emmanuel Karkari-Mensah ’28, a Business Administration major, viewed the posters on display. He was in the Animating the World of Myth course and traveled from room to room talking to his fellow first-year students about their work and what they studied.

“I thought it was cool to see the projects completed in each course,” he said. While he enjoyed his course topic, which focused on mythology, he’s also intrigued by crime stories, which were explored in two different FYS courses - True Crime and CSI: EC. “It’s neat how each class put out a creation based on their theme.” His favorite piece from the Showcase was a simple but well-thought-out poster about a particularly gruesome serial killer.

“This event is the first time the first-year class has come all together since the Candlelight Ceremony they attended when they first arrived during Fall Welcome,” stated Adam Giambrone, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Director of First Year Seminar. “Students got to socialize with their classmates while they practiced their presentation skills and shared their academic work in a public setting.”

In the Morris Classroom in Meier Hall, a student in Instructor of Art Jan Kather’s course, Lights, Camera, Re-Action! jumped at the chance to work on their public speaking skills. As the class video played on a large screen, Jinx Hill ’28, a Theatre major, shared how the class watched movies together and discussed film conventions and their effects.

“I really enjoyed the discussion we had in class about the film Nope and how the director was making statements about how black people were often left out of Hollywood history,” they said.

“I spoke a lot that day” Hill confessed.

As a culminating project, the students created a video explaining the conventions of lighting, sound, color, and camera techniques and practiced using the methods themselves.

For Hill, FYS helped them “ease into college” and develop important skills like time management.

“I also practiced talking in front of people. We gave presentations and got a lot of feedback. And I learned how to talk about a movie with others, which is important to my major,” they added.

“This demonstrates the dual purpose of the FYS program,” Giambrone remarked. “All FYS classes share the two main goals of helping students become part of the EC community and building students’ critical thinking, reading, writing, and presentation skills. These classes do this by focusing on a variety of topics meant to appeal to the diverse interests of our students.”

As Hill said, “This is fun, so I’m excited to be here.”