As an article elsewhere in this newsletter explains, this semester, two of Mason Korea’s associate deans and I have returned to the classroom. We are teaching Mason’s course UNIV 100. UNIV 100 is a one-credit course that introduces new students to the university and seeks to give them tools to succeed at Mason.
We at George Mason are very proud that our graduation rates are both strong and, importantly, roughly the same across diverse demographic groups, including students from historically underrepresented and lower socioeconomic status groups. Students from these groups may have less familiarity with how universities work or strategies to succeed there. A course such as UNIV 100 addresses that issue.
But it is not just students from these groups who benefit from a course such as UNIV 100. I know that my own children—whose parents are both professors!—could have used such a course. Fortunately, they sometimes asked their parents for advice. But not every student has parents that have spent decades working in a university.
At Mason, we believe so much in this course that I and my associate deans decided not only to teach it this semester, but also to do so each semester from now on. Since the course is one credit, it fits well into our schedules.
Here is my syllabus. The course includes tips for academic success, such as how to manage multiple deadlines and how to study effectively. But it also covers college life more generally, giving advice on getting involved in student activities, preparing for job searches, financial literacy, and handling stress.
I think one of my most important lessons involves the value of a US-style university curriculum, which emphasizes breadth of learning as well as depth. Students at Mason must take courses across many different kinds of knowledge—in the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts—as well as complete the requirements for their major.
But I tell my students it’s really not that they must take this range of courses, but rather that they get to take them. That’s because I believe in the interest and pleasure of many subjects taught across the university. It’s also because, in my experience, outside the university one is called on to know about many things, not just the subject of one’s major.
But most of all, it’s because I think that one of the most important things students learn in their time at a university is how to learn. If a student forgets ten years later how to handle derivatives, the properties of carbon atoms, the definition of an indifference curve, or to what litotes refers, that’s okay. What students will remember is how to learn whatever they need to know across diverse kinds of knowledge.
It’s a privilege to help launch students in their college career this semester and watch them both learn and learn how to learn.