Seminar Associations / The Learning Strategies Workshops

Your First-Year Seminar is more than just a class. It's also an association of fellow students you will come to know well during your four years at Albion. Throughout your first semester on campus, you will meet with your Seminar Association to participate in Learning Strategies Workshops facilitated by a staff leader and student mentors. The workshops complement your First-Year Seminar experiences and are designed to help you learn what is expected of you as a student, how to make the most of your educational experiences, and where to find the resources you need, so that you can bring all that together in top-notch work.

Each of us, for example, has our own learning style and differing skills at knowing what tools to use in the learning processthe Internet or the library, a college department or a public agency, research or interviewing. Some of us can also use a little constructive advice when it comes to prioritizing tasks, making the most of our time and talking to faculty. A few tips, provided in these workshops, can go a long way toward helping you succeed at Albion. (You probably have two or three tips you can share too.)

Another aspect of the Learning Strategies Workshops focuses on the challenges and choices associated with living away from home, like adjusting to having a roommate, taking care of your health (it's your job now to remember to take your vitamins), standing by your convictions and recognizing when you or a peer may have a need that warrants special attention. Your Albion College cares about the whole you.

As part of the Workshop series, you will also have a Common Reading Experience in which, with other students, you discuss a book that you will all have read over the summer. Have you read Lorene Carey's Black Ice or Typical American, by Gish Jen? What about The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, or Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities? The Common Reading Experience will help you and your peers ease into the college academic environment and will inspire you to seek more, question more and dig deeper within yourself to find out what lies there. (That's a promise.)

What you've probably already noticed is that all of the things we've talked about so far tie nicely together (by design). They serve to make Albion your Albion, a place where you feel at home, comfortable with your faculty and peers and able to navigate confidently through the academic environment. They invite you to learn not just about what is out there on campus for building a career, but what is inside you for building a life.