This class is primarily a ¿welcome-to-college¿ class¿ one that introduces you to a liberal arts education, to various departments and disciplines with their own distinct ways of asking questions, and to skills you will need for navigating college and careers. A major focus in the class will be developing connections through the class project. The class will alternate between class sessions that focus on your success as a college student and course content.

To what extent is the United States achieving the ideal of "one person, one vote," and what role should mathematics play in democracy? In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama's congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against Black voters. The majority opinion contains numerous references to the work of a geometer.

This first year Connections class connects students to each other in an exploration of arts and activism and how to balance life as students and scholars interested in justice and social change. It connects students to campus programs about arts and justice, and it connects students to the community by introducing them to the work of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) and its work with incarcerated women.

This course focuses on ghost stories. We will explore ghost stories from different cultures and time periods with special attention to nineteenth and early-twentieth-century studies of the paranormal. Our investigations will draw on diverse fields of study, such as history, literature, philosophy, physics, and religion. Along the way, we will work collaboratively to produce a podcast on ghosts and ghost hunters in history.

How do we experience, visualize, and think about the everyday? What are components of our everyday lives and lenses through which to understand them? How does creativity contribute to our well-being and sense of community and support academic and extracurricular commitments? We will look at the ways that everyday lives and culture are made visible. Through student art projects, multidisciplinary readings, reflective writing, and discussion, we will give attention to our own environments, roles, and activities.

This course explores how art can begin and is used by social movements and everyday forms of resistance. From movies to fashion, dance to street theater, art can transform how we understand systems of power and ourselves. Such transformations in identity and worldviews can seed protest. Art can be used not just to mobilize people but also as a form of enacting opposition.

Medical Narratives explores how the experience of health, illness, and medicine is shaped by language into multiple acts of storytelling, including the complex narrative interactions between patients and health care workers, health and illness, body and mind. The course will examine accounts of how cultural and individual lived experiences provide different conceptions of health and healing and illness and disease, and what those narratives reveal about medical knowledge and authority, empathy and belief, metaphor and fact.

The Wizard of Oz is a classic 1939 film musical starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, a girl from Kansas who makes some unusual friends as she follows the Yellow Brick Road, defeats the Wicked Witch of the West, and learns valuable lessons about truth, home, and flying monkeys. Not only telling a great story through song, dance, and dazzling visuals, The Wizard of Oz has also provided a rich text for scholars from a rainbow of different disciplines to examine and interpret.

Economics is everywhere! Although, often we may find it hard to see. In this class, we will explore how economic concepts, present around us, manifest themselves in interesting ways in popular culture that we love. From box-office smashing movies to chart-topping songs to award winning television shows and artwork, all can serve as important avenues to help us learn and apply economic concepts that are central to our lives.

Using the text The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney as a foundation, this class employs the concept of a "study group" to explore ways to navigate the terrains of a liberal arts education, practice community and self-care, and make operative and empowering use of knowledge through a highly interdisciplinary approach.