NMS: More Students, More Texts, More Fun

The fall semester is well underway here at Columbia College Chicago. New Millennium Studies, the first-year seminar course required of all freshmen, has expanded yet again. This year, we're offering the class to 648 students each semester (that's 36 sections of 18 students). It's mind-boggling to look back to fall of 2005, when we had only 12 sections per semester, and even more so to look ahead to 2008-09, when we'll be offering the course to every incoming first-year student: that'll be 50+ sections per semester.

This semester, we've also added a new text to the group of common texts that instructors use in their sections: Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. Thus far the student response has been very positive (graphic novels being, of course, much cooler than novels of the non-graphic variety...). It's kind of a big semester for all things comics here, in fact; Columbia's Creative Non-Fiction Week is hosting events featuring Art Spiegelman (author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus) and Scott McCloud (author of the immensely useful [and fun] Understanding Comics).

NMS is part of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Core Curriculum and is one of only two courses that all Columbia students take. (The other is First-Year Writing.) But, as just the comics-related stuff above indicates, there's lots of Liberal Arts teaching and research going on at Columbia (there are six departments in the school of Liberal Arts and Sciences, after all).

It's an exciting time!

Photo of Millennium Park, Chicago by David H. Krause