Dear Colleagues,
Join us in bringing our newest students into our intellectual community by teaching in the Freshman and Sophomore Seminar Program this fall.
Most seminars meet for an hour once a week, for one unit of credit, and are meant to be discussion-based and interactive. Seminars can be on almost any topic you can dream up. This semester, faculty are leading seminars on “Classical Hollywood Cinema,” “Trees In The City,” “Race, Gender, and Social Life in Colonial Honduras,” and “Engineering Your Life: Tools for Authentic Leadership.”
Our students tell us that seminars reawaken their zeal for learning. One student said that the most important thing they learned in Alex Filippenko’s fall 2025 seminar, “The Nature of Space and Time,” was that: “Being passionate and open–minded is key to learning new, interesting, and niche ideas.”
If you would like to teach a seminar in fall 2026, please let your department chair and scheduler know, and then submit a Faculty Participation Form by Thursday, February 19, 2026. Senate faculty who teach a 1- or 2-unit Freshman and Sophomore Seminar as an overload will receive a $3,000 grant that can be used for anything related to their teaching or research.
To receive more information about the Freshman and Sophomore Seminar Program or to brainstorm ideas, contact Aileen Liu, Director of Curricular Engagement Initiatives in the College of Letters & Science, at aileen.liu@berkeley.edu.
Sincerely,
Oliver M. O’Reilly
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
Jennifer Johnson-Hanks
Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science