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Foundation Year

Foundation Year

The focus of your first year at Atria University is on building an understanding of yourself – your goals, passions, and skills. Additionally, we enable a strong foundation of knowledge, to get the most out of your learning across majors. Our intent is to prepare you for life and make you a leader and problem-solver who can bring change in the world.

Building a Knowledge Foundation for Life

Discover yourself, experience a range of subjects, identify your interests, and understand your strengths in the foundation year. All students complete a set of common courses which empower them with the foundational knowledge to build on for the years ahead.

Your first year is focused on:

Building an understanding of self – your goals, passions, and skills
Developing the skills to collaborate in learning and doing
Taking action within a complex real world
Strengthening the foundation of knowledge for learning more in all majors

Our overarching intent is to make you more effective in whatever you choose to do after the Foundation Year. Additionally, you will also be able to make informed and well-thought-out decisions for yourself and the rest of the world.

Your Learning Roadmap

In the foundation year, months 1 to 12, all students study the same concepts. Year 1 is an interdisciplinary year designed to be relevant to all students regardless of their future specializations.

You will be introduced to multiple disciplines and develop problem-solving skills throughout the year. You will learn through Courses, Projects, and Workshops.

Courses

Deep dive into courses, 1-3 weeks at a time. Explore foundational courses like Inquiry, Mathematics, Ethics, Algorithms and Programming, Terminal Physics, Appreciation of Differences, and others. At any given time, you will be engaged in only one course. Courses are designed to kindle curiosity, create foundations for work on real-world projects, and empower you to learn how to learn. Active learning pedagogies will be used.

Year 1 Courses:

Design Atrium
Physics of Motion
Using computers to solve problems : Intro to Python
Basics of Chemistry
Numbers in Action
Introduction to Inquiry and Critical Thinking
Unity and Diversity of Life
Appreciating Difference

Workshops / Guest Lectures / Field Visits

Workshops, guest lectures, or field visits will happen throughout the year. Experience workshops on Problem-Solving and Design Thinking, Having a sense of place, Communication skills, Critical Thinking, Self-Awareness, and Artistry in Year 1. These enable you to understand self, develop an interdisciplinary mindset, to think and act critically.

Year 1 Workshops

Problem-solving and Design thinking
Critical Thinking
Communication Skills
Self-Awareness and Teamwork
Artistry
Sense-Making

Projects

Taking a real-world problem statement, you will work with your classmates to create a meaningful impact in one of the 5 majors. Projects such as these will be designed to mimic the professional working environment in the respective field. Under the guidance of able mentors, you will normally have elements happening off-campus.

Each project is 3 weeks long. At the end of this, you will have a clearer picture of what kind of opportunities each major has to offer and where your strengths and interests lie.

First Year Learning Goals

Our foundation year engagements are designed to help you begin your journey towards several curricular and extra-curricular learning goals. Some of these goals are fundamental building blocks for all engagements while others will be the main focus of a particular course/workshop/project.

Personal Goals

We will endeavour for you to achieve several personal goals, all of which will be essential in life.

Ethics

Ethics, beneficial for society and individuals, is a necessary situational judgement. It requires clarity in thinking, empathy, and a fearless point of view.

Self Awareness

Self awareness enables you to work with others while being fully conscious of how you feel, who you are, what space and position you occupy in your environment, and what drives you. Learning using emotional intelligence, acknowledging subjectivity and bias, awareness of the body and health will drive your action and words, minimising negative affect.

Artistry

The ability to interact with the world and your mind through art. The medium is up to you, the student. It is the creative and appreciative lens that we are looking to expand.

Interpersonal Goals

Interpersonal skills are core to collaborative goals, which will form a dominant part of overall goals in life.

Team Work

Healthy collaboration and teamwork will be an intrinsic requirement to every workshop, course, or project that you undertake. At Atria University, collaboration is valued over competition. We aren’t just looking to make you work in groups. We will also enable you to bring your individuality to a group, work out differences well, and learn to be efficient in this process.

Leadership

We believe that an effective leader influences the collective impact on team goals, while taking less credit and more blame than the team. Leadership is equally about stepping back as much as it is about taking the lead.

Listening/Observation

We seek to create problem solvers whose solutions will address the needs of all those who are affected. The students will be exposed to the multiple phases of problem solving, beginning with problem identification, and using empathy, listening, and observation skills to solve it.

Communication

Communication includes speech, visual arts, presentation skills, body language, and responsive behaviour. Pitching an idea requires organizing your thoughts, and knowing your goal. Communication must be non-threatening and involves learning to read between the lines, and understanding that you are both allowed and welcome to speak up.

Mind, Body, and Behavior

Our interactions with other people are not driven by rationality alone. The several ongoing rational and irrational decisions we make and enact are at the centre of being a person in a society. We will delve into cognitive and social psychology to help you become more aware of the ways in which people understand, think about, decide and take action.

Societal Goals

A sense of place and context

What is happening around you right now? Paying attention to the silos and silences that separate us all. Being aware of the history and geography that shaped the present we live in. Knowing how to take action within the ecosystems that you live in. You will gain greater awareness of challenging situations, as well as how to examine and critically understand from unfamiliar contexts.

Appreciation of Differences

Ethics is built on the question of personal action/decision making as situated in society/community, enabling action with empathy. For us, ethics is situated in historical and systemic thinking, and thus is an appreciation of differences. Through field visits and engagements with communities, we will work on dimensions of ethics, empathy, history, and systems thinking as both theory and practice.

Sustainability

To ensure that the systems we live within are vibrant for the next many generations, we need to understand the interdependence between humans and nature. We will explore our relationships with a more-than-human world through naturalist studies, ecopsychology, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainable living.

Processes to achieve goals

Knowledge & Action

Knowledge and action

Inquiry-based learning

The dominant education paradigm presents facts and then asks questions to see if you have understood the facts. Inquiry-based learning empowers you to learn from asking questions and exploring these questions through strengthening our own process of observation, thinking, reasoning, and judgment.

Design Thinking

In the steps between an idea and grand success lies design thinking. Working with design thinking challenges you to remove the assumptions that we know what is needed and seek to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.

Systems Thinking

Gaining an understanding of how systems work – and how we play a role in them – lets us function more effectively and proactively within them. The more you understand systemic behavior, the more you can anticipate that behavior and work with systems (rather than being controlled by them) to shape the quality of your life.

Demystifying Expertise

We often switch off our critical thinking when we hear an ‘expert’ speak on a topic. A key aspect of education is learning how academic expertise is arrived at, how to trust, and critically engage with information and narratives as we seek and produce them.

Breadth & Rigour

Within a skillset or field

Basics of the fields

Content covered in the first year is intended to develop your understanding and intuition of the basics of various fields. This content helps build a vital foundation for pursuing majors. The first-year STEM courses are a set of fascinating explorations about what makes the world work. Most importantly, the courses will incorporate projects embedded in the real world, allowing a realistic exploration of topics and not limited to a theoretical approach.

We also recognize that in a class of students from varying backgrounds, several topics will be more familiar to some than others. Our classroom pedagogies are set up so that if you have prior expertise in a particular topic, you will have the opportunity to deepen your knowledge on a topic beyond what the rest of the class might be learning. On the other hand, if the subject matter is new to you, we will support you with additional bridging material.

Foundations in Math

This will enable you to develop an intuition for and understanding the languages of geometry, measurement, basic algebra, and calculus.You will use visualization and exploration to achieve this.

Foundation in Science

Mechanics, energy, electromagnetism, atomic theory, redox reactions, cellular biology, evolution, and the biology of human behavior will be taught.

Algorithms and Programming

Hands-on experience in using computation to solve simple problems. Reinforcing concepts from Mathematics and Physics through interactive visualizations.

Kinesthetic Doing

You will learn to utilize your hands and bodies for skills that demonstrate the great force and delicate movements they are capable of. In doing so, you will explore your full potential.

Gain a sense of what is involved in the majors

Through the course of the first year, you will experience five immersive, 3 week projects, one for each major. This will enable you to choose your learning paths and your specializations in the second year. You will work on projects in: