This is a Freshman Seminar
Note: Freshman ‘advising’ seminars are special academic classes that combine freshman advising with small group learning.
At MIT, you will meet and take classes with exceptional scientists and engineers. Given your impressive background and an MIT education, you may perhaps become one in your own right. In this seminar we will reflect as a group on the backgrounds and experiences that go into making an exceptional human being, whether in the sciences, a profession, or other areas of life. While sharing our own exceptional stories, we will learn from exceptional work by poets and artists, including William Blake and Emily Dickinson, among other theorists and practitioners of what can be called the science of exceptions: a science not of the genus, species, or set, but rather of the unique and irreducibly singular.
Discussions will be led in large part by your own interests, questions, and shared topics of concern, accompanied by plenty of refreshments. Light reading and informal writing assignments will stimulate our conversations. Special excursions – to plays, museums, and readings at MIT and in the Boston area – will be planned throughout the year.
