Three students sitting at a table with a book, talking together
Three masked people at a lab bench
A large group of students sitting in a circle outside in Adirondack chairs
Students at a table, smiling, with a faculty member also seated

First-Year Seminars strengthen students’ ties to each other, to faculty, and to their own learning–from their first moments on campus.

Our Purpose
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About FYS

First-Year Seminars (FYS) welcome students to Hopkins by inviting them to ask and grapple with audacious questions. A lively entryway into the excitement and discovery of a Hopkins education, FYS are designed to spark dynamic discussion and debate while creating close-knit cohorts of first-year students. Each seminar is taught by a member of the Hopkins faculty who guides small groups of passionate peers as they take intellectual risks, analyze core texts and big ideas, visit archives or museums, contribute to research, and more. With over 75 choices, each seminar is unique to the faculty teaching it, but all are discussion-based with embedded experiential learning, capped at 12 students, and graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory instead of with letter grades. Welcoming students to Hopkins with both warmth and rigor, FYS ensures that every new student finds an intellectually inspiring and supportive home at Homewood.