During senior year, it's the thesis. During junior year, it's junior independent work. During freshman year, it's the freshman and writing seminars. The Princeton sophomore year, however, has been left without a defining academic characteristic.
With the needs of sophomores in mind, the University is directing resources to enrich the second year experience.
Last year, the offices of the deans of the faculty and the college introduced the Sophomore Initiative.
The initiative's central goal is to prepare sophomores for their academic future by helping them make more informed decisions about majors. Furthermore, the initiative prepare is intended to students for future independent work by developing their research skills.
An Oct. 8 memo sent to the faculty by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel and Dean of the Faculty Joseph Taylor described the program as one that "supports imaginative efforts to enrich the sophomore academic experience."
One of Malkiel and Taylor's other priorities is to continue bringing sophomores closer to the faculty, a process that begins du-ring the seminars of freshman year, by placing them in smaller classes.
Malkiel said the program is in its early stages, adding that "some of the new projects are going to show up as early as this year."
Funded through the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, the initiative helped fund a number of projects in its first year. Among them was the development of an introductory course for nonspecialists in the Department of Molecular Biology. The course, entitled From DNA to Human Complexity, will be co-taught next fall by molecular biology professors Eric Wieschaus and Bonnie Bassler.
Wieschaus said he aims to teach an exciting course that will not only appeal to non-scientists, but also will be of special interest to sophomores.
"The Sophomore Initiative is broad in terms of its goals for the second-year experience," Wieschaus said. "We want to fill a need at the University and give sophomores the opportunity to experience something different academically before they begin a major, while possibly fulfilling a distribution requirement at the same time."
Molecular biology professor and Undergraduate Program Representative Gerry Waters said that this course, like others in the initiative, will not be restricted to sophomores but will certainly be "ideally-suited" for them.
Waters also said the "reaction has been very enthusiastic and people are looking forward to it."
Other projects that were funded in the initiative's first year, according to the memo, include: the development of new sophomore-level courses to take advantage of new faculty appointments in the anthropology department, the development of new courses in the chemical engineering and politics departments, the enhancement of CEE 263: Rivers and the Regional Environment and EEB 211: The Biology of Organisms and the development of special precepts in sophomore-level courses for prospective concentrators in the classics department.
Since the initiative is still in its early stages and has not yet significantly changed the sophomore academic experience, Malkiel said it is "much too early to tell" what the response from students and departments that participate in the initiative will be.
"The Committee on the Course of Study worked on this initiative over a period of several years, so this is a long-term investment. We won't see an immediate transformation," she added.
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