2024 SUMMER READING ASSIGNMENT FOR AUCA FRESHMEN

 

Dear Incoming Freshmen,

This year, we look forward to meeting you during the Orientation program from August 21 to September 1, 2023. We are proud to have you as our new students and welcome you into our community of friends, colleagues, and scholars! This is a new beginning for both students and family members; beginnings that we hope you are ready to explore.

The Orientation program is designed to facilitate the transition between your previous learning experience and the one that awaits you at the University.

This year’s program adopts the theme of "The Sound of Silence".

Our Orientation events are packed with academic, social, and community service-learning activities that foster responsible freedom and AUCA’s values as a liberal arts institution.

The goal of the Language and Thinking academic sessions is to introduce you to the interdisciplinary and challenging study culture at AUCA, which includes creative, yet fun, learning experiences, and intensive writing across a variety of genres and texts.

An important part of your preparation for the Orientation program (and the fall semester as well) is your summer reading assignment. 

All first-year students are expected to read and reflect on:

• Arendt, Hannah -- “We Refugees”
• Khayyam, Omar -- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• Pinter, Harold -- Mountain Language

We would like you to mark the texts up: underline passages, make comments in the margins, and on a separate sheet, reflect on how these texts might relate to your own life at this time. Prepare to use these notes when you join the Orientation program in August. 

We will use your thoughts as the starting point for our conversations. We hope that during orientation in August, this initial thinking about the texts will lead to larger conversations and that each of you will seize this opportunity to engage yourself in a dialogue with your peers and professors. This will help you prepare academically and integrate more smoothly into the larger unique intellectual community and culture of our University.

In the fall and spring semesters, these two texts, alongside other texts, will be the common readings for all of you in your First-Year Seminar course. As you begin your journey towards the completion of a liberal arts education at AUCA, these shared readings and other equally engaging and challenging texts will introduce you to and encompass the University’s values that will broaden your world, and increase and deepen your understanding of complex issues. Engaging with these texts will bring people of diverse backgrounds together and create a common ground for discussion among faculty, students, and friends during the Orientation program as well as throughout the years to come.

If you have problems in uploading the text (the page is not found or other such technical problems), you may email kadyrova_k@auca.kg to request the text be sent to your email.

We look forward to welcoming you to AUCA!

The New Student Orientation Program will start on August 12 to August 22, 2024, and will take place on campus.

Сontact information is available at this LINK.

 

Sincerely,

Kamilya Kadyrova

Director of AUCA New Student Orientation Program

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