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Course Overview: University 100 (The Freshman Seminar)

Catalog description for University 100

Darby the CSUN squirrel reads "The Glass Castle," this year's Freshman Common Reading. University 100: The Freshman Seminar (3 units, letter-graded) is dedicated to ensuring your college success and motivating your journey toward lifelong learning. The seminar will enable you to develop your own plan for personal, academic, and career success through self-evaluation, application of specific techniques, discussions, field experiences, and traditional classroom exercises. These activities will help you acquire effective study strategies, stimulate your critical and creative thinking skills, practice university-level oral and written expression, establish short-term and long-term goals, become a skilled user of library resources, and learn to manage time more efficiently. You'll find out about the many campus resources available to students and will be actively encouraged to form lasting relationships with your professor and classmates. This is a course about making choices: about setting and meeting your personal, academic, and career goals. University 100 is available for GE credit in Subject Explorations--Lifelong Learning (S4), and for Information Competence (IC) credit.

Typical assignments for a University 100 class

Student Self Report Card
Cultural Event Report: analysis of a campus event (students select and attend the event)
Weekly discussion forum posts (online)
Information competence research project
Brief reflective essays examining the links between college and career, and between individual identity and college success
Various assignments linked to each year's Freshman Common Reading
In-class exercises focusing on various strategies for academic and personal success in college
Time-management practice (time logs)
Getting Involved: students participate in one meeting of a campus organization and report on the experience
Ethical decision-making: short exercises (role-plays and online forum posts) applying theoretical frameworks to examine complex problems

Sample syllabus: weekly topics (full semester)

Week 1: Welcome to College
Week 2: Where Have You Come From?
Week 3: Where Do You Want to Go?
Week 4: Values and Time
Week 5: Critical Thinking and Studying: Going Beneath the Surface
Week 6: Learning to Understand the Language of the University (Research)
Week 7: Taking Stock of Where You Are
Week 8: Research, continued
Week 9: Getting Engaged: Your Ideas and Everyone Else's
Week 10: Planning for the Future
Week 11: Taking Care of Yourself (now that you have to do it yourself)
Week 12: Financial Planning and Budgets
Week 13: Fruits of Your Labors
Week 14: How Have You Changed?
Week 15: Looking Back and Going Forward