I’ve had many moments at Middlebury over the last few years where I marvel at what I’ve been able to learn here. Taking classes that are actually functional — invigorating, even — has been a fairly novel delight in my academic career, coming from a high school which is consistently on the list of failing public schools in our state. Needless to say, I did not exactly have great preparation for Midd classes, and I definitely did not do enough to remedy this before college. During my first weeks here, I could barely speak in class. The thought of writing anything at the college level made my stomach churn. What changed all of this for me, giving me a voice in discussions and an eagerness to write, was my first year seminar, “The Journey Within.”
In high school, the most advanced writing class offered was AP English, which I took over Zoom my junior year. I unsurprisingly slept through most of it. The following year, plagued with intense senioritis, I signed up for the easiest English class our school offered: creative writing. By the time I graduated, I could write really bad essays, and really bad poetry. That was about it.
When I got to Middlebury, I relied heavily on my peers and my older sister who, two years my senior at Midd, had taken many of the same classes as me and kindly shared her writing with me (just for guidance, I promise!). I was convinced, from the start of my first semester in the spring of 2023, that I would never feel comfortable here as a college-level writer. Now, three years later, I’ve been a peer writing tutor for our college’s writing center for two years. A huge part of my writing skills and confidence as a student were born during my first year seminar.
As I think back to the courses that were most impactful to me as a student at Middlebury, I immediately recall this first one. We read Salinger, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and seminal texts like “Siddartha” and “The Dhammapada.” But beyond the books we covered, our professor thoughtfully fostered an environment where we, as unsure and inexperienced college students, could enjoy 75 minutes twice a week in meditative conversation. We reflected on the literature of course, but also, just on the newness of everything we were experiencing that spring. We all met with our class's peer writing tutor at least once, and we were encouraged to meet with each other, too, to talk about our writing or even just our thoughts on what we were learning. By the end of the semester, I had some new lifelong friends, a treasured mentor, and some papers, poetry and creative nonfiction I was very proud of.
What made this seminar so fruitful, I believe, was its emphasis on learning through doing — we were encouraged to write about what we found exciting about our readings, and we were encouraged to do so in whatever form we were drawn to. Yes, we had to write the classic textual analysis essays too, but the structure of our final assignment was largely up to us. By having so many chances to explore the boundaries of our own writing and creative abilities, I gained an invaluably robust repertoire of compositional skills.
Our hands weren’t necessarily held in this course; rather, we were encouraged to pursue and perfect whatever literary genre we liked without fearing intense consequences. As first-semester college students, the impact of a class where we felt entirely safe to take risks with our writing and push the boundaries of what we had learned from high school was the single-most important skill I gained.
As a course-embedded tutor to various first year seminars, I have seen firsthand how seminars like mine can encourage students to think critically and creatively. Rather than approaching college writing as a formulaic process, these are the ones that produce not only better writers, but more importantly, confident, inquisitive college students.
In seminars I’ve worked with that tend to approach college writing as a box-ticking, high-stakes process, I often hear students telling me that they are primarily concerned about getting a good grade on their next writing assignment rather than actually developing their writing skills. More concerning than that, I get more and more kids from these courses that come to me, as first-semester college students, saying that they hope to never take a writing class at Middlebury again after this.
The number one goal, I believe, of our first year seminar program in terms of college writing preparation should be to keep students engaged and mindful about their writing process, and excited to write. As a student myself who has reaped the benefits of a seminar that did exactly this, and as a tutor who has witnessed the effects of courses that foster comfortable, creative writing environments, I urge faculty to consider these factors when honing their curriculum for their first year seminars.
And for the students in first year seminars now, I’m thinking of you all, and hoping you are finding ways to enjoy writing when you can this fall. You have the next four years to stress over papers. This is the time to have fun with writing, lean into your imagination, and make “mistakes”. And a reminder, or perhaps more so a request, to all powers that be at Middlebury: The first year seminar should be fun!
