Liberal Arts Welcome Email August 2022
Subject: Welcome to Warwick Liberal Arts
Hello,
Congratulations on your place to study Liberal Arts in the School for Cross-faculty Studies. As you may know, Liberal Arts is an ancient model of interdisciplinary education that aims to foster critical thinking to train future leaders to tackle the complex global challenges of both the present and the future. We very much look forward to welcoming you into this tradition of learning and to the School. My name is Dr Bryan Brazeau, and as the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Interim Director of Student Experience, I am responsible for coordinating and overseeing your course.
Starting university is a busy and exciting time, but it is also common to have questions or concerns. We have a strong sense of community in our department and we are here to support you, both with your transition to university and throughout your degree. If there is anything you would like to discuss before Welcome Week, please get in touch: liberalarts@warwick.ac.uk
Our University Welcome pages provide information to help you prepare for your first few weeks at Warwick. In addition, we have worked with current students to put together Welcome pages for Liberal Arts students, which you should look at before you arrive. Please bookmark these pages and check them often, as we will be posting our programme for Welcome Week 2022 and a checklist for new students in the coming weeks.
Welcome Week (commencing 26 September 2022)
During Welcome Week, we run events and activities in partnership with the Students' Union, designed to help you settle in, make friends and adapt to life at Warwick.
You will be able to view the timetable of events from mid-September. This includes welcome sessions from Liberal Arts, as well as many other events and activities to suit a variety of interests. All the core activities from Liberal Arts will be automatically populated in your bespoke Welcome Week timetable, so you will know where you need to be and when.
We would strongly encourage you to attend all of our academic induction activities taking place during Welcome Week. In these Liberal Arts sessions, you’ll learn about how to make the most of your time on the Liberal Arts course, our pathway structure, the many opportunities available to you as a Liberal Arts student, and important rules and regulations in the department. What’s more, these activities will also help you become acquainted with our signature Problem-Based Learning teaching style, gain some useful skills for groupwork and project management, and provide you with many opportunities to ask questions and prepare for the new term.
The Welcome Week activities are designed to help you transition to university study smoothly, and to empower you to do your best on the Liberal Arts course. Students who attend the academic activities in Welcome Week often tend to perform better on assessments throughout their degree. Of course, Welcome Week activities are also a great way to get to know the staff members in the department along with other Liberal Arts students!
We are keen to ensure that our Welcome Week events are accessible to all, so please get in touch with us as soon as possible if you have any accessibility requirements: liberalarts@warwick.ac.uk.
Transitions and Learning at Warwick
Transitioning from school or college to University can feel both exciting and daunting. Styles of teaching are different and there will be more opportunities for you to make your own decisions and study independently. This is doubly the case within Liberal Arts, where you will have the freedom to build your own degree course (via your pathway) based on your intellectual interests.
We are committed to giving every student the best possible university learning experience through accessible and equitable education. In Liberal Arts, you will be taught exclusively through small Problem-Based Learning workshops, groupwork, and independent study. In your classes elsewhere in the University, you may encounter larger lectures, seminar groups, and other modes of teaching.
You will use a system called Tabula to view your personalised course timetable, and will find out more about this after you have enrolled. While you do not need to worry about choosing your optional modules yet, you will need to confirm these choices by the end of Welcome Week. You may wish to start looking at our Liberal Arts pages for information on disciplinary pathways (if you intend to take one), or to consider other optional modules for your specialist pathwayLink opens in a new window by looking at the modules offered in other departments. As a reminder, in Year 1, you will have 45 CATS (credits) of optional modules to choose (this can either be three x 15-CAT = one term modules, one x 30-CAT = year-long module and one x 15-CAT, or any other combination that totals 45 CATS). If this seems confusing, please don’t worry! We will go over all of this with you in Welcome Week.
To help you prepare for university life, a group of students have created an online resource especially for students in the Faculty of Arts, hosted on our online platform, Moodle. There is lots of great advice on what to expect from your time at Warwick and the support services available to you. Specifically for Liberal Arts students, we also have a bespoke Welcome Week Moodle page that is full of resources and helpful information to ease your transition onto the course. You can find the link for this Moodle page on our departmental Welcome Pages.
Feel free to start exploring these resources before you arrive at Warwick! Indeed, you are warmly encouraged to watch all of the videos on the Liberal Arts Welcome Week Moodle pages and to note down any questions you have about the material. You’ll have many opportunities to ask these questions during Welcome Week.
We have also co-created some helpful webpages with current students that will guide you through the transition to Warwick. Each section includes a variety of resources including student discussion panels, advice and top tips from students, plus links to websites with further information. We hope you will find these pages useful not only during your first few weeks, but throughout your university journey.
Support with your studies
We are committed to supporting both your academic success and professional development here in Liberal Arts, and across the University. A wide range of support is available for you both within Liberal Arts and across Warwick.
Personal Tutor
Each student at Warwick is assigned a personal tutor, who you will be required to check in with at regular intervals (these are known as monitoring points). Your personal tutor will help you navigate your university journey and can help you with both module and pathway selection, providing academic and personal support throughout your time here at Warwick. If things get difficult at any point or if things go wrong, your personal tutor can help you navigate the Mitigating Circumstances process, and can also help connect you with university resources, and can signpost you to a wide range of additional help and support. For all Liberal Arts first-year students, your personal tutor will be Dr William Rupp, Liberal Arts Teaching Fellow.
Academic Skills Development
Within the Liberal Arts Department, our first-year modules are designed to support academic skills development. Our introductory module, Principles and PraxisLink opens in a new window, will help you learn more about the principles of a Liberal Arts education, while providing you with key skills workshops that will help with academic writing, evaluation of sources, time management, giving presentations, and more. Qualitative Methods for Undergraduate Research will help you gain the skills you need for archival research, conducting interviews, and thinking about research design.
Both Art and RevolutionLink opens in a new window and Science, Society, and the MediaLink opens in a new window, will introduce you to a wide range of complex problems in the real world and beyond. Through these modules, you’ll learn how to break down wicked problems while working as a team, what theoretical approaches may be most useful when addressing these, and most importantly, how to ask meaningful research questions that can lead to impactful and focused interdisciplinary interventions.
You’ll emerge from first year with intellectual tools that will provide you with excellent preparation for further study in the later years for your degree course.
Certificates and the Warwick Award
Both the School for Cross-faculty Studies and the wider University provide several free opportunities for you to explore and gain mini-credentials during your degree with us. Within the School, you can choose to take our Liberal Arts Certificates: the Certificate of Digital Literacy, Certificate of Professional Communication, Certificate of Sustainability Consultancy, Certificate of Coaching Practice, and our new Carbon Literacy Certificate.
More broadly within the university, The Warwick Award with Student Opportunity is another avenue to gain credentials during your time with us. The Award is free for all undergraduate students, and is designed to formally recognise employability skills gained during your time at Warwick.
The Library
The Library offers a range of study spaces as well as subject specific resources. You can find out more on the Get Started pages and during the Library Induction in your first week.
Reading List
Each year we select a book for students to read before the degree starts, for discussion in Welcome Week and other sessions in Term 1. The book we have selected for this year’s incoming cohort is Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen. The book will help us think about why games matter and why they can help us rethink the beauty of our own reasoning and actions in the real world. We have chosen this book as it links nicely with some of the Problem-Based Learning approaches we use in the department, and because it strikes a balance between interdisciplinary learning and engaged citizenship (two pillars of Liberal Arts learning). For more information about this recommended reading, visit the Liberal Arts Welcome pagesLink opens in a new window.
While we would encourage you to purchase the recommended reading mentioned above, you are able to access the book as an e-book via the Warwick Library.Link opens in a new window
Most of your core modules will not require you to purchase books, so please hold off on purchasing books before your modules begin. That said, you are very welcome to purchase any books on the reading lists that strike your fancy (and may wish to purchase one or two books per module throughout your time at Warwick so that you have a bookshelf with annotated physical volumes to look back on after you graduate).
Disability support
If you have a disability or specific learning difficulty, it is important that you contact the Disability Services teamLink opens in a new window within Wellbeing Support Services before starting your studies with us, even if you have already declared this on your UCAS application. Additional support can take time to arrange, so please contact them as early as possible to ensure you get the support you are entitled to.
Hear from our students on OurWarwickLink opens in a new window
Our bloggers have lots of helpful hints and tips about starting university. You can read their blogs, watch their vlogs and ask them any questions you may have about University life! Read content from our Liberal Arts student bloggersLink opens in a new window to hear more about the department ahead of arriving in September.
What's next?
- You will receive emails from the University about services, opportunities, and support available to you as a student.
- You'll soon receive an email inviting you to enrol (if you have not already), please follow these instructions carefully.
- Keep up to date with the department on Facebook and follow us on TwitterLink opens in a new window.
- You might also want to follow the Liberal Arts Society on InstagramLink opens in a new window.
We very much look forward to seeing you soon and to welcoming you as the newest members of an ancient tradition. We can’t wait to see what you will do with your time here and how you will build a degree that reflects your own unique interests.
In the meantime, please be in touch with us at liberalarts@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window if you have any questions.
Warmest wishes,
Dr Bryan Brazeau
Associate Professor (Liberal Arts)
Interim Director of Student Experience
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Deputy Head of School