First Year Reading Program

This is the tenth year that all incoming new students have been asked to read a common text and to engage in a discussion during New Student Orientation. This year's book is Half a Life by Darin Strauss.

The First Year Reading Program encourages all incoming first-year students to read a common text and discuss it with a small group of fellow students, led by a faculty member and student leader, during New Student Orientation in August. Books will be distributed to all incoming first year students at each of the four Preview sessions in June. Students who do not attend Preview will receive their book in the mail in July.

Inspired by a desire to bring faculty, administrators, and students together outside of a formal classroom, the reading and discussion aim to help students begin the life-long process of finding meaning in their lives. The First Year Reading Program:

Provides new students with a common educationally purposeful experience;
Offers new students an opportunity to explore their gifts and talents and to begin to reflect upon how they might use those to serve others;
Challenges new students to begin exploring new perspectives and ways of viewing the world.

Half a Life is the eleventh book chosen for the program and was preceded by The Chosen by Chaim Potok (2002), A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind (2003), Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (2004), A Lesson Before Dying by Earnest J. Gaines (2005), Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang (2006), Bombingham by Anthony Grooms (2007), Run by Ann Patchett (2008), Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (2009), and Peace Like A River by Leif Enger (2010), and The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore (2011).

For more information, please contact the Office of Student Development at Marquette at 414-288-7205.

First Year Reading Program

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