A Whittier College education is transformative. When you graduate in four short years, you will be a different person than when you entered.
You will be exposed to a range of people and ideas that will cause you to think about and question who you are and the roles you can and will play in bettering society. You will quickly experience the fact that learning is an exercise in complexity.
Rather than focusing on discrete facts, memorization, and knowledge produced by others, your professors will ask you to rethink, unlearn, and reconfigure what you thought you knew. The facts, of course, still matter. However, the focus on our campus will be to approach texts and data with careful and critical evaluation of what we can know, how we come to know it, and what we still don’t know. You will also be asked to apply that knowledge beyond the classroom. As you explore those opportunities beyond the classroom, you will start to see the contributions that you can make to Whittier College, the community, and the world.
Whittier College values community as an integral component of the Four C’s of our liberal arts curriculum: Community, Communication, Cultural Perspectives, and Connections. Given that your Whittier experience will be complex, we want you to begin grappling with that notion and focus on developing an appreciation of community right from the start! Your faculty mentors have selected a variety of readings and films they would like to have you prepared to discuss during Orientation. Each book and film relates well to the Four C’s and will be the foundation for the intellectual conversations during your early days and weeks as new members of our community. We are asking that our new students read the book before they arrive for New Student Orientation. This type of preparation will enable you to contribute to the many, and varied, intellectual conversations you will have during the early days and weeks as a part of our community.
Sal Johnston
Vice President for Academic Affairs & Dean of Faculty
sjohnston@whittier.edu
Gil Gonzalez
Associate Dean of First Year Programs
ggonzalez@whittier.edu
