Quest for Knowledge First Year Seminars

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Your new beginning at New College will bring exciting opportunities! You will meet new people and learn about their experiences, you will study new topics and push yourself to grow, and you will shape your own unique path.

New beginnings can also bring challenges as you navigate a new environment. Join fellow first-year students in a Quest for Knowledge course. These courses were created to help you master those challenges and launch your success by teaching you how to:

  • Take charge of your learning inside and outside of the classroom in new and exciting ways
  • Leverage campus resources to help you succeed
  • Navigate the New College academic program and use it to support your goals

Quest for Knowledge 2025 Courses

Knowing the Ancient Past

Dr. Frederick Pirone

Knowing the Ancient Past is about the nature of evidence and how we come to know what we know about a given topic. Students will get a chance to contemplate what is the nature of available evidence and how to use that evidence to support a position using history and myth as the context. Students will evaluate, reconcile or weigh different lines or types of evidence that may also potentially be conflicting. Specifically, students will go on a search for the lost city of Atlantis described by Plato in his work “Timaeus And Critias” through an exploration of the available evidence in the archaeological record, histories, literature and historiography of ancient societies and cultures. Students will evaluate the different types of evidence, interpretations, and theories in order to critically think through the data and construct arguments for where Atlantis is potentially located and provide a written defense of their position. 

The Idea of a Social Science

Dr. David Ellis

This Quest for Knowledge course introduces students to the vocabulary, concepts, and approaches underpinning the philosophy of Social Science. To make the ideas come alive, students will watch popular movies representative of them and then discuss in class how they relate to reading assignments. Additionally, students will learn how to analyze their reading assignments for key content and take notes on them for class discussions. This course aims to provide students with foundational knowledge applicable across the Social Sciences, introduce them to key debates in and approaches to the profession, and convey the relevance of the Humanities to the practice of Social Science.