What a Difference a Course Makes: Early College Experience Fosters Flexible and Transcendent Self-Identities

The college experience is often referenced as a period of ‘finding yourself’. The concept of self-identity is considered malleable and often formed during time spent at a university or college. One way universities provide opportunity for changes in identity is by offering liberal arts core curriculum courses that allow for the broader thinking of the self, the world, and of one’s experiences. Examples of these courses include Honors and First-Year Seminar (FYS) courses. These courses offer exposure to new topics, ideas, and cultures, which can help students better understand themselves and their place in the world. I hypothesize these courses will assist in helping students change from rigid and concrete senses of identity, to more flexible senses of identity. Specifically, I predict students in these courses will come to describe themselves and their experiences in more flexible ways at the end of the semester compared to more rigid descriptions of self and experiences at the beginning of the semester. As expected, preliminary investigation of the data has indicated students in FYS and Honors courses in the beginning of the semester show high levels of rigid descriptions of themselves and their experiences. As the data is analyzed, we expect to see the students describing themselves and their experiences in more flexible ways come the end of the course