First-Year Experience Foundations 1
Civic Engagement and Personal Well-Being: The first course in a two-semester sequence required for first-year students. This course explores issues of well-being and civic engagement at the personal, local, and global levels. The course will serve as an introduction to writing and critical thinking skills.
First-Year Experience Foundations 2
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: The second course in a two-semester sequence required for incoming first year students and some transfer students. This course explores issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice on local and global levels. Through this study students will explore issues including bias, privilege, power, and responsibility that are foundational in creating an inclusive and just society. Students will continue refining critical thinking and writing skills. Offered every spring.
Scientific Inquiry:
These courses focus on empirical data as a means of exploring and answering questions about the natural world. They provide experiences for students to engage in the methods of science, such as hypothesis formation and testing, systematic observation, and analysis of data.
Human Behavior and Society:
These courses explore individual human behaviors, groups, or systems through methods grounded in social science.
Arts & Creative Expression:
These courses explore human expressive activities as a means of interpretation and communication, designed to reveal certain meanings and ideas or to elicit specific responses.
Cultural & Textual Inquiry:
These courses use interpretive methods and critical theories to examine the products and/or practices of human cultures.
Historical Inquiry:
These courses explore the ideas and practices of past societies. These explorations frame the contemporary world’s understanding of how and why historical societies changed over time, as well as these societies’ perspectives of themselves and their worlds.
Data Analysis:
These courses apply quantitative and statistical concepts to solve real world problems.
Local Studies:
These courses focus on subjects within the historical and present boundaries of the United States while recognizing the nation is a contested and contingent formation encompassing diverse populations. These courses advance students’ understanding of core characteristics from Foundations courses.
Global Studies:
These courses ask students to consider subjects in political and social contexts outside the boundaries of the United States. By acquainting students with the diversity of thoughts, beliefs, and values of non-US societies, these courses advance students’ understanding of core characteristics from Foundations courses.
Ethical Decision-Making:
These courses explore ethical decision-making and its relation to our responsibilities to ourselves and others. They generate an understanding of ethics and value systems and practices. Ethical Decision-Making courses revisit some of the key issues discussed in the Foundations courses.
Experiential Learning:
Experiential learning courses consist of approved high-impact practices such as internships, service learning, co-curricular or extra-curricular activities, study abroad, entrepreneurship, collaborative projects, or undergraduate research opportunities. Incoming, first-year students are required to complete TWO distinct experiential learning experiences. May be fulfilled by a course that also fulfills an Inquiry or Mission requirement or a course in the major. Foundations courses cannot carry an experiential learning designation.
Undergraduate Research Experience
These courses are designed to immerse students in the processes that professionals in the discipline use to create new knowledge.
Synthesis:
The Synthesis course provides an opportunity for students to integrate and reflect on the knowledge they have gained from their Inquiry, Mission, and Experiential Learning coursework. This 0-credit course is aimed at students who have completed at least 96 credits.
Capstone:
Capstone courses allow students to demonstrate their abilities as apprentice practitioners in their chosen fields of study. Students will share their work with an audience appropriate to the project as determined by the academic department. Senior research projects, senior seminars and senior exhibitions or performances are examples of possible capstone experiences.
Disciplinary Writing:
These courses provide instruction and practice in discipline specific writing conventions.
Disciplinary Speaking:
These courses provide instruction and practice in oral communication in the discipline.
Simpson College Foundations
All entering, degree-seeking, first-year students will take Foundations 1 in their first semester and Foundations 2 in their second semester. Entering, degree-seeking transfer students with fewer than 48 credit hours are required to take Foundations 2. Instructors organize seminars to meet the needs of different cohorts (i.e., separate sections for first-year students, continuing and online undergraduates, and fulltime transfers).
