The
Foundation Year Programme (often called '
FYP', pronounced 'fip'), a first-year four-credit
course at the
University of King's College in
Halifax, is one of the more interesting university programs in
Canada today. The
teaching format borrows heavily from the
Oxbridge system of
lectures and
tutorials, allowing for a large (200+) body of students to take the same course while still interacting with a small (~20) group. The
curriculum is
ambitious, beginning with the five thousand year old
Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with
20th century postmodernists like
Jean-Francois Lyotard, and covering a good portion of the
Western canon in-between. Added to this are
nice touches, such as a weekly informal discussion between
lecturers and
students,
oral exams in place of
written exams, and an
insular campus culture that encourages
nerdiness,
amateur philosophizing and
copious amounts of
pretentiousness. The
student body is a roughly equal mix of
rich trust fund hippies and
brainy scholarship students who, imbibing the
atmosphere of the place, often dress in black and hope for a day when
berets become
socially acceptable.
The
workload for students (sometimes known as FYPpers) is high: three
readings (which are
long,
dense and/or
frustrating) each week, and a
paper every two weeks (due on
Mondays, leading to the term
FYP Sunday to describe when most students actually get down to writing the thing). The
payoff comes from being
exposed to a stream of
strange,
weird and
wonderful new ways of
looking at the world, and trying to
sort through the ideas with the people around you. That, and the joy of thinking - if only for a
brief moment - that you're the first to find the answer to an ancient,
vexing question.