Teaching first-year students at Princeton is at once easy and hard.  For many instructors, the FRS is the first course they have taught that is comprised solely of first-year students. Working closely with a small number of bright and eager students who are new to Princeton is incredibly rewarding. Many faculty members, in fact, characterize their time teaching a FRS as among the most exciting and rewarding teaching experiences they have had at the University. At the same time, however, making the transition from teaching more experienced students to teaching first-years poses challenges. It is important to recognize the fact that first-year students are at an earlier stage in their social and intellectual development than their older peers. Embracing both of these conditions—the students' excitement and their greenness—offers opportunities to make a good seminar into a great one.

In a word, energy! Because first-years are aware that taking a FRS is a unique and special experience, they bring with them a distinctive and pervasive level of excitement and engagement. Past faculty members explain that this level of enthusiasm results in students producing high-quality work—even better, in some respects, than that of more experienced students. While the FRS are set apart from other courses in terms of their makeup, they are fully-fledged components of the curriculum: they count for credit, fulfill distribution requirements, and are focused on content knowledge. Faculty offering FRS are encouraged to focus on covering subjects that are intellectually rigorous and which may not be the kinds of things they would normally teach as part of their departmental curriculum.  With this said, it is important to recognize that these students will also not only be learning the content at hand, but will also be becoming exposed to the faculty member's discipline itself, often for the first time.  FRS do not have any prerequisites.  They are conceptualized so as to teach any and all of the students who make them up.  Indeed, we encourage students to look for courses that pique their interest, even if they have had no previous experience with the subject to be studied.

Students interested in enrolling in a FRS apply online once the application period begins. Those doing so are able to indicate up to five choices.

While the University has gradually increased the number of FRS offered, demand still exceeds the number of spaces available. Seminar assignments are first made via an algorithm designed to place the largest number of students into one of their top choices.

Students placed in a fall-term seminar are notified of their seminar placement via email to their Princeton University ID before Freshman Orientation. Notification of the spring term seminars takes place in October. Since first-years are allowed to apply for a FRS in both fall and spring terms, some of them may receive preferential placement in the Spring term if they were not admitted to a fall term seminar.

In the event of demand for spaces in a particular seminar exceeds the number of spaces available, faculty members are encouraged to maintain waitlists in case spaces open up during the first-year course enrollment period.

FRS program administrators will also direct inquiring students towards those courses with openings during the course enrollment period.

Unlike the 650-character descriptions offered in the Registrar's Course Offerings, FRS course descriptions are not limited by length. While we prefer your depiction of your course be clear and focused, we also encourage instructors to craft their descriptions in a lively and engaging style. Effective course descriptions often draw students in by first posing a question or problem that evokes the course's broader topic, and then by explaining how this, and related, questions, can be explored within the concept of a broader scholarly literature and debate.

An instructor teaching an FRS affiliated with a specific Residential College makes use of the seminar rooms in that  college as often as possible. We try our best to have those instructors who are college fellows teach in their colleges, but doing so is not always possible.  In the event that a FRS instructor teaches in a College where they are not a fellow, they are provided with privileges whereby they can meet students over meals and in other informal settings. The FRS program and the Residential Colleges frequently co-sponsor special events, such as film series, guest lectures, museum trips and field excursions.

It is important to note that students are able to apply to any FRS, not only those hosted in the College where they live.

The FRS program's generous donors have enabled us to support seminars in a variety of ways. All requests for funding should be discussed with the Director of the Program as early in the process as possible. In general, the program supports funding for equipment for lab and science courses, transportation and tickets for field trips (including a modest class meal), and honoraria for guest speakers. Funds can also be available for class parties (again on a modest scale).  Some faculty members host these at the end of term, while others find an earlier gathering helps students bond with each other outside the class in a way that enhances their interaction inside the classroom.

Once the class roster is finalized, it is can be accessed via the ‘Teaching and Advising’ tab in PeopleSoft. Instructors can also communicate through the various tools in Canvas to interact with their students.

As a FRS instructor, you are particularly well positioned to identify students who might need additional academic support (i.e., individual tutoring, consultations with the McGraw Center, working with Writing Center tutors, etc). We encourage our faculty to actively monitor students' progress and to look to identifying those who might benefit from such guidance. You are very likely to be the first member of the Princeton faculty to work closely with the students in your class, and while many of our students come to us remarkably well prepared and ready to take full advantage of all that the University has to offer, some find that they need additional guidance to realize their potential at the college level. Please recognize that, because you work so closely with your students, you might be aware of academic issues that would not be apparent in larger classroom settings. We encourage you to set a low threshold for encouraging students to seek help, to help them understand that it is the best-performing Princeton students who take advantage of the University's learning resources, and to bring any concerns to the attention of the student's dean and director of studies through an Academic Early Alert (AEA) report. Please note: AEA reports are informational only and are not made a permanent part of a student's record. On the contrary, they are simply means by which academic advisers are enabled to identify and address students' needs.  Beginning the process as early as possible is very useful!

Service at Princeton means responding thoughtfully and ethically to issues in the world. Courses help students prepare for, reflect upon, carry out, and evaluate effective and appropriate service and/or community engagement.  Faculty members working with the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES) on one or more aspects of their course may choose to attach a Community-Engaged Learning attribute to their course.  This attribute will place the course on the ProCES course list updated each semester and shared on the Office of the Registrar’s ProCES Course Offerings page.

Community-Engaged Learning offers students opportunities to deepen their thinking on critical societal issues. Typically, a course includes one or more of the following elements:

• Opportunities for reflection on the publicly-engaged orientation of the course material, the discipline, or student work;
• Guest speakers including representatives from community-based organizations, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations who provide expertise and insight on course themes;
• Off-campus trips highlighting the work of community partners related to the course material;
• Direct service, such as tutoring or teaching, related to course materials and learning goals;
• Research projects that meet course learning goals and respond to a community partner priority;
• Event highlighting the public implications of students' academic work.

Instructors are limited to teaching one Freshman Seminar per academic year.

Freshman Seminars do not require any prerequisites other than an interest in the subject. However, if a seminar, because of its specialized nature, requires particular qualifications or appropriate academic background, this fact should be specified in the course description.

The FRS program approves and pays for AIs (or TAs) only for SEL (Science and Engineering with a Lab component) seminars. These funds come from an endowment that is restricted to this purpose only. There is no funding for TA/AIs for non SEL seminars.