Starting in fall 2025, Barnard is recentering the first-year academic experience to deepen connections, expand course offerings, and guarantee that every new student begins their journey fully immersed in Barnard’s unparalleled, rigorous liberal arts environment.
This means more courses taught by Barnard faculty, more opportunities for first-years to build strong relationships with professors and peers, and a slate of brand-new language courses, including Italian, Chinese, Korean, and American Sign Language, that reflect the global curiosity of Barnard students.
What’s Changing?
Now, the first year at Barnard will be at Barnard.
Dozens of new courses are being introduced, emphasizing community building, interdisciplinary exploration, and the unmatched opportunity of studying right in the heart of New York City. First-year students will still have access to a small number of Columbia courses, especially those tied to potential majors, but the foundation will now be firmly set at Barnard.
Barnard’s signature Modes of Thinking courses will also be taught at Barnard. These courses are designed to sharpen analytical and creative thinking across disciplines, and they will be taught exclusively by Barnard’s faculty, on Barnard’s campus.
Stronger Academic Foundations, Stronger Connections
At Barnard, academic rigor thrives in a tight-knit community. First-years will be immersed in that experience from day one.
“Our students wanted more first-year courses, more direct engagement with Barnard faculty, and more ways to connect with New York City. Now they’ll have it,” said President Laura Rosenbury. “The new Foundations curriculum offers the best of both worlds: the close knit, rigorous learning environment of the nation’s premier women’s college, combined with all New York City has to offer.”
Our approach prioritizes what makes a Barnard education exceptional: direct engagement with leading scholars, close relationships with peers and mentors, and an academic culture that challenges students to think critically and lead boldly.
Because at Barnard, we don’t just teach you how to think. We teach you how to rethink, and think again.
“I’m enormously proud that we are recentering the Modes of Thinking courses at Barnard,” said Provost Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “Our students told us that they wanted the ability to take more of their courses on our campus with Barnard professors, and we’ve now organized our curriculum so that they can do exactly that.”
New Courses, New Opportunities
Students wanted more first-year-specific courses, and they also wanted more courses that introduced them to multiple approaches to urgent contemporary issues. Now they have both.
This fall, incoming students will have access to an expanded catalog of subject areas, such as:
New York City
This course sweeps through the history of the City’s five boroughs, working its way back from today’s most pressing urban issues toward their roots. The course will cover topics such as the built environment, immigration, finance, language, literature, journalism, music, dance, theatre, food, fashion, politics, transportation, public monuments, and museums.
Usable Security and Privacy
This course explores fundamental concepts in the field of usable security and privacy, including why computer scientists must understand users’ security and privacy perceptions, experiences, and contexts in order to design and deploy security and privacy mechanisms.
Graphic Autobiographies and Biographies
Autobiographical and biographical graphic narratives are perhaps the best known and most widely read graphic literary texts. This course examines how the combination of word and hand-drawn images affords creators a wide variety of formal and stylistic devices for depicting emergent identity, historical experience, trauma, memory, and post-memory, among other themes.
Introduction to the Global Middle Ages
This course integrates new approaches to the Global Middle Ages, including attention to connectivity, comparative studies across contexts, and a survey of world literatures. The course will require visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Met Cloisters.
American Political Thought
This course is a study of the development of American political ideas, through critical analysis of the writings of intellectuals and political leaders from the American Founding to the present.
This is Barnard at its best: rigorous, interdisciplinary, and connected to the present moment.
And now, it starts on day one.