As part of the Freshman experience at VCU, all incoming students complete a two-semester course through our Focused Inquiry program. This program is designed to provide students with a small skills-based seminar in which they can investigate and debate a variety of topics.

This year’s seminar will explore the themes of history, memory, and possibility.  We will look at these themes from a variety of angles – through memoirs, popular music, new technologies, even current psychological research.  

Our class in particular will emphasize ethics and critical thinking, and we will invest a lot of time in considering the roles we each play in our local, national, and international communities. We will take empirical approaches to cultural issues, and interrogate how (if at all) representation and visualizations of data can be made to approximate lived experience.

Every section of FI is different, but we all share some common texts and goals. Everyone in this year’s freshman class will read The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.  In all sections our curriculum is designed to prepare you to:

• critically read and respond to texts,
• participate in whole class and small group discussion,
• generate relevant questions and conclusions,
• support conclusions with appropriate evidence, 
• generate both informal and formal written products for assessment,
• practice appropriate information retrieval and source evaluation,
• interrogate the principles of responsible citizenship, and
• work collaboratively on presentation projects.

By the end of the course, you will be equipped to generate substantive critical responses, both written and oral, based on evidence, facts, logical conclusions, and reasons, rather than on personal assumptions or hasty assertions.

Welcome to VCU.