The Aquinas Program is an innovative approach to first year in university. It is designed for any student who is entering university hoping for an exciting exploration of new ideas and ways of thinking and learning.

Established in 1994, it offers an integrated approach to three disciplines in one coordinated year-long experience. It is an alternative to the regular first year program -- five separate courses, taken with five different groups of people. It's designed to introduce you to the liberal arts, and to the university, through ensuring that a small group of students takes three thematically related courses together.

It works like this: you choose a section of the Aquinas Program by enroling in a set of three related full-year courses, amounting to 18 credit hours. You choose other courses amounting to 12 credits to fill out a full-time program.

During the year you, and the 35 or so other students taking those same three courses, will be invited to attend to and explore a common theme or idea. As a member of a small group, you'll get special attention from the professors, and you'll have the chance to come to know other students in a context of shared interests, ideas, and tasks.

Any full time first year student is eligible to choose the Aquinas Program. It's not designed either for top students, or for those who expect to have some difficulty: it's for anyone who is interested in learning and who hopes that university will offer a chance to learn in a challenging and exciting, yet warm and collaborative environment

You'll have the chance to work on the skills you'll need to succeed in later years -- learning your way around the library and the Internet, becoming a better communicator and a more fluent and persuasive writer and thinker, learning how to budget your time and plan and assess your own learning.

You can expect to learn how to make connections between different disciplines and ways of thinking, and apply what you learn in one course to ideas and problems raised in others, and how to work with other to extend and enrich those connections.
 

For 2006-2007, there are three sections of the Aquinas Program, each organized around a specific topic: "Seeing and Believing,"  "Great Books" and "Justice and Globalization." For information on the individual sections, click on the name of the section.