New College Students Finding Their Place

“Finding Your Place,” a new program offered to incoming freshmen, is in full swing on campus and in the surrounding areas. The program comprises both a full-credit course, “Discovering a Sense of Place—Upon and Beyond the Domain” and co-curricular activities led by the Office of Student Life. With goals of enhancing the first-year experience and helping students feel at home at Sewanee more quickly, it is a rigorous program of academic, social and geographical exploration led by seven faculty members.

The course offers 106 new students the opportunity for amazing Sewanee experiences earlier in their college careers than usual. In their first week on campus, these students might walk a cemetery with religion professor Gerald Smith, visit the Highlander Folk School with philosophy professor Jim Peterman, walk the Mountain Goat trail with biologist Deb McGrath or hike Shakerag Hollow with geologist Bran Potter. They have met the merchants of downtown Sewanee and will engage in community service with MountainTOP Ministries.

In a story about the program on its website, Inside Higher Ed described Sewanee’s Finding Your Place program as “the next generation” of first-year programs. “While some colleges are trying to integrate their various seminars, orientations and bridge programs, Sewanee’s seems to be an ‘intentional evolution’ of the first-year experience,” said Jennifer R. Keup, director of the University of South Carolina’s National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.

Sewanee admissions counselor Josh King said, “This is not about college readiness, at least not in the traditional sense. It is piecemeal of what you would find at other first-year programs, but when you combine that with the sense of place, you can really understand how community works.”

The coursework in Discovering a Sense of Place will require the skills of reflective writing, close reading and synthetic thinking. The sections are “Your Place, or Mine? The Tension of Place in Narrative and Storytelling” taught by English professor Virginia Craighill; “Here and There, Now and Then” with classics professor Chris McDonough; “The Mountain Goat Trail: A Journey in Community Health,” Deb McGrath; “Honor and Justice,” Peterman; “Walking in Place,” Potter; “The Seen and the Unseen: Maps, Memory, and Our Common Life in Sewanee,” Smith; and “A Landscape for Memory,” historian John Willis.

Craighill described it this way:“They’re both understanding their landscape—where they are— but also understanding where they are in the world, what their place is here in the community of Sewanee and then understanding at a deeper level what this place has been in history.

 “We’re hoping that they get to see a subject matter—such as a place—through all of those lenses so that they understand there is more than one way of looking at that place, and through that broad perspective that they’ll approach their academics,” she said. All of these experiences will help students find their own places as well as their places in the community of Sewanee and of other communities in the future.