Seminars
Build essential skills. Experience deep inquiry and dialogue. Be a part of a lively community.
SOU Seminar Experiences
The mission of seminars is to develop essential skills, to encourage a dynamic relationship with learning, and to advise and support learners at SOU. Seminars offer challenging and personalized learning experiences. Seminar instructors also serve as academic advisors and mentors, helping learners to better navigate their many choices at SOU.
Instructors design seminars around an inquiry theme. Whether that theme links to the arts and humanities, the social sciences or the sciences (and most themes are highly interdisciplinary), all seminars aim for interactive conversation about important questions. Seminars offer the supportive space to practice writing, speaking, thinking, reading, and researching – the skills learners will use at SOU and beyond. This is what a smaller university is all about – belonging to a group of peers, interacting in small learning environments, and discovering new ideas with instructors who are passionate about their work.
University Seminar
University Seminar (USEM 101, 102 and 103) is a three-term, 12-credit course sequence that anchors the University Studies curriculum. USEM’s mission is to engage learners, help them to build a strong connection with peers, and develop the essential skills that will meet the expectations of university study and learners’ future careers.
Honors Seminar
The Honors Seminar sequence (HON 101, 102, 103) anchors Honors students’ first-year curriculum. In the Honors College, these seminars are part of the 50 credits of Honors coursework designed to satisfy all of SOU’s University Studies learning goals. Students must be admitted to the Honors College to enroll in Honors Seminar.
Seminar FAQs
How do I select a seminar that is a good fit for me?
Be curious! Choose the road less traveled. Often students feel that they must select a seminar that seems to align with a prospective major. While this approach may work in some cases, it isn’t always the best selection strategy. Many students will change their major choice several times. Other students are undeclared. Seminars are designed to accommodate many majors and to offer the space for all kinds of perspectives. For example, a seminar dialogue around food choices might be addressed from the vantage points of nutrition, environment, history, animal welfare, or social justice. For another example, a dialogue on voting might be addressed via political policy, democratic practice, education, media influence or technology. In this way, selecting a seminar is not so much about “fitting everything I do with the major I am considering” as it is discovering ideas that are interesting, provocative, and mind-expanding. While some seminars fit well with certain majors (especially those related to sciences because of their heavy course loads), others aim to be good fits for all majors at SOU.
Why does a seminar sequence run for three terms?
There are many answers to this question, but here are a few:
- Yearlong seminars achieve results. Research shows that having a well-planned sequence of courses to build foundational skills is more effective than opting for a patchwork selection of courses. Much like in studying languages or mathematics or a musical instrument, regular practice of certain skills consistently over time improves those skills dramatically.
- Learners respond well to being part of an ongoing and connected community of peers and having their professors know them personally.
- All learning tends to develops incrementally, iteratively, and over time. Seminars take the approach that all essential skills are practiced in all terms and that those skills are integrated throughout. Reading, writing, speaking and research are not broken into separate “blocks” but happen organically as they would in work settings beyond SOU.
- Seminars are more than just a basic writing course, a communications course, or a research course. In this case, the whole is really greater than the sum of its parts. Seminars include bigger discussions around the nature of learning, the definitions of meaningful work, academic and career planning, and what it means to be an active part of a community of lifelong learners.
- Many larger schools do not have the luxury of such connected, personalized and ongoing learning – the type of learning that SOU believes in, values and supports. In many ways, it is the privilege of a smaller university (whether public or private) to offer yearlong seminars. SOU makes this choice because it is of great benefit to students.
Am I eligible to enroll in the Honors Seminar?
Students are eligible to enroll in Honors Seminar only if they have been admitted to the Honors College.
Contact Undergraduate Studies
SOU Division of Undergraduate Studies
1250 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR 97520
541.552.6505
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