Florida International University has long realized that the first few weeks of college, the first semester, the first year, provide an essential foundation upon which our students build success and establish the patterns and behaviors that will see them through to a timely graduation. To that end we provide a meaningful orientation experience, required academic advising, a First-year Interest Groups (FIGs) program that reaches over half of our new students, and a first-year seminar that is a required component of the University Core Curriculum.
The first-year seminar course, SLS 1501, helps students make the transition to a new learning environment, and this year it became the home to our pilot common-reading program, which we "test drove" at BBC last year with Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory. This year's book, a memoir written by the Iranian writer Firoozeh Dumas, is Funny in Farsi, which not only is a propitiously timely choice, given the prominence of Iran in the international news, but it works exceptionally well with our particular student population, many of whom know first-hand the difficulties encountered when trying to understand the nuances of a new language and a new culture.
