Students walking by Pride Statue

The First Year Experience

Through the First Year Experience, you will build a sense of community at your new home by engaging in common experiences and activities around a common theme across your academic and extracurricular lives.

  1. Academics
  2. Undergraduate Degree Programs
  3. The First Year Experience

What is the First Year Experience?

Through the lens of a year-long common theme, the First Year Experience is designed to foster community, expand worldviews, and strengthen critical thinking skills, all building blocks for success at Widener and beyond.  

The common theme is interwoven into all aspects of your first-year life, from your courses and residence hall programming, to special events and other campus activities.

With a focus on creating an interdisciplinary and collaborative learning environment, the First Year Experience promotes opportunities for meaningful interactions among you, our students, and our faculty and staff, all bringing together diverse voices and perspectives on a topic. 

How is the Program Interwoven into Your First Year?

  • Freshman Orientation
  • Part of foundational introductory courses in each major
  • Part of introductory courses commonly taken across majors
  • First Year Seminar
  • Residence hall and living learning communities programming
  • Key campus events
  • Common readings

The common theme of “community” has been selected at a time when the ideas and actions that define community seem more important than ever. In a time of fear and loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic, of reckoning with the pain and violence of systemic racism, and of insecurity and uncertainty about the future of our planet, it can feel as though our communities are riven.

But the prospect of studying community also offers hope for reparation and respair. We welcome first-year students to explore the theme of community from multiple perspectives, and to ask big questions. What makes up a community? How are we part of a community from a position of care for others? Who is excluded from or vulnerable in our communities? What do we owe our communities, and what do our communities owe us?

Courses and events across the first-year experience will take up the theme with approaches focusing on social justice, race, food insecurity, the environment and climate change, sustainability, and resilience. Faculty and students are collaborating across courses in biology, engineering, political science, English, and more, and students are joining a community of voices by contributing to a collective blog, “Writing Community at Widener.”

Key Readings

  • Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
  • Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
  • Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead
  • Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
  • Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP
  • Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell:  The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
  • Charles Vogl, The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

The common theme of “home” asks the community to reflect on the different meanings and feelings this word evokes, including home as family, home as physical location, and home as Widener.

What role does home play in our personal journeys? How might home and its many interpretations factor into our professional lives? How does home shape family, our communities, and social groups? And in what ways are we inhabitants of a common home, involving the earth, sustainability, and global responsibility? 

Home can create a positive feeling, and can be used to invite and include. But home can also be used to divide and exclude. And for many people, home is a dream, as we recognize that many people, including students, grapple with homelessness.

Key Readings

  • Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
  • Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
  • Brent Staples, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White
    (Brent Staples is a 1973 Widener graduate who was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing)
  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Sports & Rec

Upcoming Events

You'll find that Widener offers all types of exciting events to its students throughout the year. Mark your calendars, you won't want to miss out on these upcoming events! 

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