The first-year Core Course, “Exploring Human Experience,” is one of the hallmarks of a University of Richmond education. All first-year students take this two-semester course, and its faculty are drawn from departments and schools all across the campus. Its aims are to develop students’ abilities to read, think, speak and write; to enlarge their understanding of the diverse ways in which thinkers and writers have sought meaning in human experience; and to establish a foundation for University-wide conversations on serious questions.
The course is organized around common, fundamental issues in human experience, such as the claims that culture makes on our lives and the varying roles that a sense of self plays in making sense of the world. It pursues these questions through readings drawn from a wide range of historical periods, cultures and modes of discourse—from the ancient to the contemporary, from the East to the West, from literature and philosophy to natural history and social analysis. Students emerge from this year of intellectual training better prepared to meet the academic challenges that they will face in their studies at Richmond.
