Critical Inquiry seminars, also known as ID1, are required for first-year students in their first semester at the College. These small courses introduce students to intellectual life at Pomona through essential practices of reading, writing, thinking, and exchanging ideas with their peers. In every ID1 seminar, students approach existing knowledge with careful consideration, encounter new perspectives, ask critical questions, and learn what it means to contribute their ideas to ongoing conversations.
Full-time faculty from across humanities, STEM, and social science disciplines teach the approximately 30 ID1 seminars, and each faculty member designs their seminar around a topic of interest (for example, “Automation and the Future of Work,” “Law and Lawyers in America,” and “Southern California Murals”). Because students’ writing and thinking at Pomona depend on an appreciation of nuance, depth, and ambiguity, ID1 seminars take a recursive approach to writing that serves students both in their eventual majors and across disciplines. That is, as students write in ID1, they work through multiple drafts, incorporate detailed feedback from their peers and professors, and rework their initial thoughts and assumptions. As they do so, students also realize the value, possibilities, and joy that come from thinking about and responding to difficult texts and ideas within an intellectual community.
You will be informed of your seminar placement during Orientation in August.
Please view our Catalog for more information.
Some examples include:
- I Disagree
- On Fiction
- Color and its Affects
- Building the Future
- Borders and Belonging in Latinx America
- Science and the Public's Health
- Lose Thyself
- The Art and Aesthetics of the Islamic Middle East
- Theatre in an Age of Climate Change