Help us choose the First-Year Text

January 15, 2020

From:  Art King, Vice President & Dean of Students

The First-Year Text is a significant component of a new student’s acclimation to college, making the selection of a relevant and relatable book critical. Therefore, this email is to invite you to participate in a campus-wide collaboration by suggesting titles for the First-Year Text Committee to review. It is essential to identify a text that will be widely embraced, supports Baruch’s Strategic Plan, and provides students with the opportunity to begin cultivating their college career on a common foundation on which they can build.

The goal is to identify a book that is insightful, inspiring, relevant to the transition our new students will undergo as they enter this next stage of their lives, and supports some of the tenets of the college’s strategic plan, namely: 1) Civic Engagement, 2) Climate Change, 3) Diversity, and 4) Innovation in Information Technology. Ideally, the text would be engaging and stimulating enough to sustain interest across all disciplines over the first two years of each student’s curriculum.

In addition, the committee will be particularly interested in works by one of the many authors who have been part of our Harman Writer-in-Residence Program over the past 20 years. These authors engaged closely with our students during their semester-in-residence at Baruch, and many are in the New York area and would be happy to speak at Fall Student Convocation—even to return at various points during the academic year. A complete list of past writers-in-residence may be found at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/wsas/academics/writer_in_residence/index.htm.

The author of the book will be invited to deliver the keynote address at the Fall 2020 Student Convocation.

For a list of previously selected titles, please see https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/studentaffairs/newstudent/firstyeartext.htm. (We are looking for books that have not been chosen before.) If you would like to review the College’s Strategic Plan, you can find it here.

For your suggestions to be considered, please submit them no later than Thursday, January 30, 2020 to deanofstudents@baruch.cuny.edu.

If you have questions, please call Art King at (646) 312-4570.