First-Year Writing Experience
The Valpo Core
The Valpo Core’s purpose is to welcome new students into academic life.
The Valpo Core curriculum and its faculty will guide incoming freshmen and help them develop the skills necessary to thrive in their studies.
- Core and its writing assignments will challenge its students to think critically and articulately about not just their personal lives, but the lives of those around the world.
- Students will connect, analyze, and exchange of ideas with great teachers and texts drawn from both Eastern and Western traditions.
- Core will prepare students to succeed in this increasingly interconnected world and to live a meaningful life of leadership and service.
- Core classes assist in making connections between people, ideas, feelings, times, gender, race, class, and cultures.
More information about Core’s curriculum can be found here.
Christ College
The Honor’s College
The Freshman Program, Texts and Contexts, is part of an Honors Humanities Program that will span throughout a student’s education at Valpo. Christ College (CC) is a two-semester sequence that meets every weekday.
- The first semester of the Freshman Program is graded pass or fail to allow students to adjust to these new demands. The second semester professors will start handing out letter grades.
- During the first few months of their freshman year, CC students together must create the Freshman Production, a full-length musical.
- For most of the year, the focus is on primary readings in history, literature, philosophy, and religion from the ancient world to the present day.
- Students will engage in materials through debates throughout the year.
- Students learn to refine and express their ideas in a variety of arenas and scholarly writing.
More information about the curriculum can be found here.