The purpose of this course is to provide an opportunity for you to explore your place in the world, and how you as an individual fit into the various communities to which you belong. This may sound trite, but it is also in many ways the purpose of undergraduate education: to gain a better sense of yourself, and to translate that sense into a concrete plan of action for getting the most out of your university experience. As such, we will engage in three forms of "exploration" over the course of the semester. The first involves a set of readings that explore issues of identity and community; these readings are alternately theoretical, to give the students an intellectual context, and literary, since literature often provides a clearer illustration of conceptual themes and issues than is possible when dealing in the world of accidental facts. The second involves a set of exercises and site visits in Washington DC. The capital city is a marvelous place to explore the ways in which identity and community are displayed and presented; much of the downtown area is a national stage, and students can be helped to “read” national monuments and museums and the like in order to see what they are saying about personal and national identities, and about the relationships between them. The site visits will allow you to explore various ways of handling the identity-community relationship, and to critically engage these various arrangements. The final form of exploration in the course is more specifically related to questions of career and major. Part of this involves self-assessment exercises such as the Meyers-Briggs personality trait inventory; part of this involves a series of invited guests who come to class and present “critical autobiographies”—in effect, tell their stories of how they got into the professions that they are in.

This is the course for you if you are looking to spend a few weeks intensely reflecting on what you might do with your next four years of schooling, and to do so in the company of classic authors and a group of classmates enagged in a similar exercise.