First Year Reading Program

Engaging new students in a shared intellectual task before the start of their first semester at Stevens can ease the transition into college.

Over the summer, incoming first-year students will receive a copy of a prominent work of either literature or nonfiction to read prior to arriving to campus in August.  During New Student Orientation, new students participate in a keynote address around the themes of the text.

During student's First Year Experience Course, they will participate in small, faculty and staff-led discussion groups focused on the reading. This format is designed to give new students an engaging atmosphere in which to interact with faculty and staff members and begin to contribute to a college-level discussion.

Outcomes

The reading program will provide new students the following:

1. An opportunity to make connections with classmates, faculty and staff members, and their new intellectual community as a whole.

2. Prime students for themes that they can expect to encounter during their first year at Stevens, such as pluralism, ethics, leadership, technology, and social justice.

3. Introduce students to college-level tasks such as critical thinking, analytical reading, and high-level discourse with faculty members and peers.

Research Guide

A research guide created by staff of the S.C. Williams Library for our 2024 First Year Reading selection is available here.

2024 Selection - What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub

Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize

A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.

Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.

In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Previous Selections

2023 Selection

How to be Perfect by Michael Schur

Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day.

2022 Selection

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully exploring what other people wake up to do each day—and night—to make our frenzied world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around an eclectic range of occupations, from rocket scientist to biscuit manufacturer, from accountant to artist—in search of what makes jobs either soul-destroying or fulfilling.

2021 Selection

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.Tracing the arc of a person’s life, O’Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These “weapons of math destruction” score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it’s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.

2020 Selection

What The Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistence, and Hope in an American City by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water—and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. And at the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself—an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice.

What the Eyes Don’t See is a riveting account of a shameful disaster that became a tale of hope, the story of a city on the ropes that came together to fight for justice, self-determination, and the right to build a better world for their—and all of our—children.

2019 Selection

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Elizabeth Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

2018 Selection

Spare Parts, by Joshua Davis

In 2004, four Latino teenagers arrived at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They were born in Mexico but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where they attended an underfunded public high school. No one had ever suggested to Oscar, Cristian, Luis, or Lorenzo that they might amount to much—but two inspiring science teachers had convinced these impoverished, undocumented kids from the desert who had never even seen the ocean that they should try to build an underwater robot.

2017 Selection

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells - taken without her knowledge in 1951 - became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.

2024 Selection Committee

Faculty:

Dr. Jennifer McBryan, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Teaching Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Dr. Lindsey Swindall, Teaching Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Dr. Zahra Pournorouz, Teaching Assistant Professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering Dr. Benjamin Paren, Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering, and Material Science

Staff: 

Danielle Maxson, Associate Director of Undergraduate Student Life Liliana Delman, Director of Student Culture and Belonging
Sarah Minsloff, Assistant Director of the Writing and Communications Center
Vicky Orlofsky, Head of Research Services
Courtney Walsh, Research & Instructional Services Librarian 

Student:

Nick Smith, Student Government Association President