Freshman seminar placement determined by algorithm

Over the summer, incoming freshmen received booklets about the freshman seminars by mail. The topics span a wide array of disciplines, from hedge funds and secret intelligence to poetry and sacred dance.

To be considered, students had to rank up to three of their top choices as well as submit an essay expressing their interests and background on the topics of their choice.

Seminar assignments are then “made in a two-step process,” said Deputy Dean of the College Peter Quimby, the director of the Freshman Seminar Program. The priority is to “give as many students as possible the opportunity to enroll in a freshman seminar,” Quimby explained. “An algorithm sorts students into seminars in a way that seeks first to maximize student enrollments and second to maximize student preferences.”

Once the algorithm is completed, rosters are accessible to faculty members. For students who were not assigned to any of their choices, their names and essays then become available to the faculty of their first-choice seminars, and the faculty member “can then look at the list of students assigned by the computer and at the list of available students and adjust the final roster in ways that will enhance the seminar experience,” Quimby said.

The freshman seminars are generally very popular, Quimby said, adding, “The biggest challenge that we face is that demand for seminars can be uneven.” He further noted that “science seminars for non-science concentrators tend to attract large numbers of students,” and seminars in the areas of psychology, linguistics and cognitive neuroscience tend to be especially popular.

For example, politics professor Diane Snyder, who teaches FRS 169: The Rest of the Story: The Six O’Clock News, National Security, Intelligence and You, said she received 85 applications from students listing her seminar as their first choice.

“I actually do read every one of the essays,” she said. Several seminar professors said they try to achieve some sort of “gender balance” and “diversity” in filling their classes.

Sociology professor Thomas Espenshade GS ’72, who teaches FRS 153: Race, Class, and the Selective College Experience, said, “Sometimes I have to make judgments [about students]” to foster diversity. These judgments may include evaluating students’ socioeconomic status and other demographic information, he said.

Economics lecturer Jean de Swaan, who teaches FRS 121: Hedge Funds: Their Purpose, Strategies, and Social Value, noted, “I wanted to have a mix of students that had pre-existing interest in investing with students that looked at it more from a public policy angle.”

Students and faculty members interviewed for this article expressed overwhelmingly positive opinions of the seminars this year. Jacob Kim ’13, who is enrolled in de Swaan’s seminar, said, “I would take five freshman seminars if I could,” though, he said, the work is “a little bit more than expected.”

Will Krause ’13, a student in FRS 111: Democracies at War, noted that it’s a “positive experience to explore a topic intellectually with your peers rather than with upperclassmen. Everyone’s pretty much on the same level, just getting here [to Princeton], it takes off the pressure.”

Wilson School professor Harold Feiveson, who teaches FRS 157: Dilemmas in Intercollegiate and Professional Athletics, said he is “always favorably impressed with the quality of the students.” De Swaan echoed that sentiment, calling teaching freshman seminars an “exhilarating experience” and adding, “What I found is that there’s so much enthusiasm that [the students] often reach out for additional material and guidance on more books to read and areas to look into.”

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Freshman seminars tend to be intimately sized and heavily discussion-based. Professors for these classes often bring guests to class over the course of the semester. De Swaan’s class often has conference calls with hedge fund and finance practitioners. Visitors to other classes have included the acting director of the FBI and the Olympic gold-medalist rower Caroline Lind ’06. Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83, who is teaching FRS 125: In the Service of All Nations? Elite Universities, Public Policy, and the Common Good, said he thinks “comments and questions” in class foster bonding between students who “tend to jell” as a group as the semester progresses.

Espenshade said one of his goals in leading the seminar is to dismantle stereotypes. He recalled a time when he tried to undermine the stereotype of athletes as “dumb jocks” by commending a paper written by the only recruited athlete in the seminar. “People started to clap just spontaneously,” Espenshade said of the experience. “It was quite inspirational.”

Some of the seminars have proved so popular that the professors have turned them into upper-level classes, open to a larger group of students. Snyder, for instance, turned her freshman seminar into a 300-level politics lecture course. The course attracted so many students that the University opened a separate course for a large group of adult auditors, who were mainly alumni.

When she tells her former colleagues at the CIA about her experience teaching the seminar, Snyder said, they often reply, “ ‘You’re still serving your country, just in a different capacity.’ ”