Let's Get Connected: Online Resources at UVa

It's no secret that UVa has a wealth of resources and opportunities available to students. But over the years, UVa students have joined together to create even more ways to get connected, such as Facebook groups, websites, and other online resources that help ease the stress of college life. Check out some of the most popular ones below:

Hoos Riding, Hoos Driving

A page for UVa students to find and share rides to different areas such as Richmond, Northern VA, and more. There are different groups depending on what region you're looking for, so make sure to use the correct one!

Free and for Sale

A page for UVa students to sell, buy, or give away (!!!) old furniture, clothes, and dorm supplies.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/216063258498780/

Housing, Sublets, and Roommates

A page for UVa students to share and find off-grounds apartments to lease or sublet during the school year and summer months.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/808020899282439/

UVA Student to Student Textbooks 

A page for UVa students to buy and sell textbooks (usually for cheap, depending on where you look).

https://www.facebook.com/groups/UVAStudenttoStudentTextbooks/

Class Pages

Class pages are created each year for every incoming class and are used to share events and communicate with members of your graduating class. Be sure to check out Facebook and http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/ to find the link for your class page!

Be sure to follow UVa's official Snapchat account @univofvirginia, where UVa students take over and document/answer questions about their experiences!

Here's a list of some popular Instagram accounts related to all things UVa. Click on the links to check them out!

Official UVa Instagram: uva

Curry School of Education: uvacurry

Frank Batten School of Public Policy: uvabatten

McIntire School of Commerce: uvamcintire

College of Arts and Sciences: uvacollege

School of Engineering: uvaengineering

School of Architecture: aschool_uva

University Programs Council: uvaupc

UVa Office of Major Events: uva_events

UVa Men's Basketball: uvamenshoops

UVa Dining Services: uvadining

City of Charlottesville: charlottesvilleva

UVa Office of Orientation: uvaonsp
UVa Office of the Dean of Students: uvaodos

The Cavalier Daily

The website for one of our largest student-run, daily news organizations. Check out this site for all of your news around Grounds!

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/

Course Forum

This site was created by UVa students to help schedule classes, rate professors, and more!

https://thecourseforum.com/

Lou's List

One of the most popular websites used by UVa students, Lou's List was created by UVa professor Lou Bloomfield and is used to help students search for classes. (Note: this site is NOT the official class registry, always check SIS to make sure your classes are correct!)

http://rabi.phys.virginia.edu/mySIS/CS2/index.php

That's it for now; be sure to check out these resources when you arrive on Grounds - you won't be sorry!

What's the Deal with the New College Curriculum?

Traditional Curriculum, Forums, New Curriculum - What's the difference?

Lately we've been getting a lot of questions about the change of curriculum going on in the College of Arts and Sciences, so this post is going to address some of those questions as well as give a summary of everything you need to know to help you choose the curriculum that's right for you.

This is the curriculum that's currently in place for students enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences. What's most important to know is that the traditional curriculum consists of two main parts: competency requirements and area requirements.

Competency Requirements:

• The first writing requirement
• The first writing requirement must be fulfilled by taking a first-year ENWR course at UVa. (Echols Scholars are exempt from this requirement).
• The second writing requirement
• The second writing requirement must be fulfilled by taking a qualifying class here at UVa (there is no one class that satisfies this requirement - there are many options!)
• The foreign language requirement
• The foreign language requirement can be met by either placing out through AP/IB/SAT II scores, by placing out based on your score on UVa's placement exam, or by taking classes in a foreign language at UVa through the 2020 level.

Area Requirements:

• Social Sciences (6 credits)
• Humanities (6 credits)
• Historical Studies (3 credits)
• Non-Western Perspectives (3 credits)
• Natural Sciences and Mathematics (12 credits)

The important thing to note here is that no one class satisfies any Area Requirement! This means that you have the ability to pick and choose which classes you want to take, as long as they fall under the "umbrella" of a certain Area Requirement.

Learn more: http://gened.as.virginia.edu/traditional-curriculum

The Forums give undergraduates a chance to take classes that are tailored around specific topics/ideas/problems. Each Forum accepts around 40 students per year, and those students then share a first-year intro seminar on the specific topic of their Forum. In the spring of their second year, Forum students participate in a Capstone class, where they work on case studies and participate in research on their topic.

New Forum topics are released each year, and for the incoming class of 2021, the Forum topics are:

• Food, Society, and Sustainability
• Space, Knowledge, and Power
• Visions of the Good

Learn more: http://gened.as.virginia.edu/forums-curriculum

This curriculum is being phased in for the first time in Fall 2017 for a select number of students within the College of Arts and Sciences. Created and led by the University's College Fellows, this curriculum is designed to engage students in a more innovative and interdisciplinary general education curriculum.

Similar to the Traditional Curriculum, the New Curriculum requires that students complete several components: the Literacies, the Disciplines, and the Engagements.  

Literacies:

• Rhetoric in the 21st Century
• This requires students to take 3 credits in a First Writing Course and 3 credits in a Second Writing Course (very similar to the traditional curriculum).
• World Languages
• Just like the traditional curriculum, this requirement can be met by either placing out through AP/IB/SAT II scores, by placing out based on your score on UVa's placement exam, or by taking classes in a foreign language at UVa through the 2020 level.
• Quantification, Computation, and Data Analysis
• This requirement can be met by completing two 3- or 4- credit courses in a variety of fields, including (but not limited to) Anthropology, Math, Statistics, Psychology, and more.

Disciplines:

• Artistic, Interpretive, & Philosophical Inquiry
• The Chemical, Mathematical, & Physical Universe
• Cultures & Societies of the World
• Historical Perspectives
• Living Systems
• Science & Society
• Social & Economic Systems

Students must take 3 credits in each of the Disciplines, for a total of 21 credits.

The Engagement Courses:

The Engagements are the biggest difference between the Traditional Curriculum and the New Curriculum. They emphasize group work and discussion, are worth 8 credits total (or 2 credits each), and revolve around 4 main themes:

• Engaging Aesthetics
• Empirical and Scientific Engagement
• Engaging Differences
• Ethical Engagement

Students take these four Engagement Courses in their first year, meaning that these classes rotate on almost a quarterly basis (so you'd take two first semester, and two second semester).

Additionally, students in the New Curriculum will attend a lecture series with guest speakers to culminate what they have learned in their Engagement Courses, and will also have a 'summer reading' project that will be used to facilitate discussion in the Engagement Courses throughout the first year.

Learn more: http://gened.as.virginia.edu/new-college-curriculum

I know this all sounds like a lot - but try not to stress!

No one curriculum is better than the other; they just work in different ways. If a Forum topic relates to what you want to study, if the Engagements in the New Curriculum sound interesting to you, or if you just want to stick with the tried-and-true Traditional Curriculum - go for it! It all comes down to what you want your academic experience to look like.

Once you've chosen the curriculum that you feel is right for you, a great resource to check out is ULink, a peer advising organization that connects upperclassmen with first-year students to help you pick classes, navigate your curriculum requirements, and adjust to college life.

• To request a peer advisor from ULink, follow the instructions on their website: https://peeradvising.virginia.edu/.

Comment below if you have any additional questions, and a student blogger will get back to you soon!

J is for Jam Packed

January Term 2013

The University of Virginia's January Term is a university-wide initiative sponsored by the Office of the Vice President and Provost. The purpose of January Term is to provide U.Va. students with unique opportunities: new courses that address topics of current interest, study abroad programs, undergraduate research seminars, and interdisciplinary courses. The intensive format of January Term classes encourages extensive student-faculty contact and allows students and faculty to immerse themselves in a subject. The College of Arts and Sciences, McIntire School of Commerce, Curry School of Education and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will offer over thirty undergraduate courses in January Term 2013. Areas of study include Anthropology, Art, Bio-Medical Ethics, Commerce, Drama, Engineering (STS), English, Environmental Sciences, History, Mathematics, Media Studies, Politics, Religious Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Sociology, and Spanish. 

The virginia.edu/jterm site gives you the information shown above describing J-term, all of which is accurate and helpful. What they don't tell you, is what a day in the life of a J-term student is like at UVA, that's what I'm here for.

After being home for all of 10 days full of family, friends, and all my favorite restaurants, I headed back to grounds. During winter break, UVA is a bit of a ghost-town, but like a calm, beautiful, friendly ghost-town of sorts. Columns seem to be brighter and brick buildings more beautiful in the cold winter air despite the construction all around. Few people are on grounds, but those that are have a sense of purpose for the new year, and the possibilities seem limitless.

My sense of purpose that drove me to cut my couch-time short was driven by my job as a Resident Advisor for j-term residents in the same building that I am an RA during the rest of the year (pretty convenient, huh?), and an amazing J-term course: Gender, Class, and Race in Teen Film. I decided to take the Media Studies course, like many j-term students, to be able to really focus in on and master a subject, while lightening my credit load for the spring semester.

Unlike the usual go, go, go of a full course load during normal academic terms, J-term takes on a much more focused and efficient pace. Every morning, instead of scrambling to get all my things together and mentally check that I had everything mapped out for the day, I woke up, grabbed a quick bite to eat and my notebook, and headed to class. The first few hours of class consisted of discussion and lecture on a number of topics centered around different portrayals of gender, class, race, sexuality, and social issues in teen film and how those portrayals are both an effect of society and affect society. The last few hours of the class, accompanied by lunch brought in by whichever group of students presented that day, was a guided viewing of different teen films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

After class, I went home to knock out the intense, but manageable, amount of reading assigned. I found myself fighting through the ideas in the articles, and fully understanding the implications of what was being discussed, finally understanding what professors hoped we would gain from the hours and hours of reading that supplement their amazing lectures. It was what pure, focused, unadulterated learning felt like, and it was fun. We took movies like Clueless and Mean Girls that I had never thought much about other than how funny they were to me, and broke them down to reveal their influences, their different perspectives, their feminist elements, and even the effect they had had on people's experiences. Our class learned to challenge what we thought and why we thought it and why we had accepted it as normal all these years. We ate and watched movies, and yet I learned more than in many other classes I have taken that I spent hours and hours and hours studying for from a book. 

J-term is multiple hours every single day of class when you could be sitting on your couch, but it is more than worth the credits you earn. It left me loving my school and the innovation of its students and faculty more than ever. It is just one of many amazing learning experiences offered to UVA students that challenges the norm of academics and presents information in an interactive and immersed format that really results in a deep and useful knowledge of a subject. J-term is jam-packed.