Tucked in the “Graduation Requirements” section of the course catalog, there’s a little section entitled “Other First-Year Courses.” Here, the catalog outlines some of Caltech’s more unique courses besides our Core curriculum, which covers many topics a budding scientist or engineer needs, including math, physics, chemistry, and more. These other courses help develop new skills beyond solving problem sets—they encourage out-of-the box thinking and engage directly with current topics in research. I’ve taken classes in all three categories of these courses, and they helped me satisfy a lot of my curiosity in research and open my eyes to new things (one even led me to my current major!)

First Year Seminars

The first category of these differently taught courses are called First Year Seminars, where a small group of first years meet with a professor a couple times a week to go super in depth into an interesting topic. My seminar was called “Life in the Universe” and it was taught by Professor Mike Brown, who became famous for “killing” Pluto—he discovered the dwarf planet, Eris, that caused a huge stir on what it meant to really be a planet. He even wrote a book on it, which I got signed by him when I visited Caltech as an admitted student!

The class was super fun—at the very beginning, we did our best to define what life is (turns out, it’s really hard!) and from there explored what made Earth unique and the possibility of life in the rest of our universe. We dived into the history of Mars that dictated where we now send our rovers, what secret life might even be hidden on Europa, Enceladus, and Titan, and we also looked at how exoplanets are analyzed for potential life. We even spent a week talking about what would happen if we did find aliens (and I got to talk about one of my favorite sci-fi series, The Three Body Problem!)

To this day, this seminar is one of my favorite classes ever. It made me super interested in astrobiology, which actually led me to my current major, geobiology. It helped me learn to ask questions of everything and consider a lot of the impossible, like how we can push our idea of what life really needs to survive.

Frontier Courses

These are known as pizza courses, and they’re a weekly hour-long class during lunchtime (which also means lunch is provided!) meant to expose us to research happening on Caltech campus. There’s usually one for each major. I took the biology and bioengineering pizza classes, and in each of them, a professor came in to talk about their research. I learned lots of new things about machines that I didn’t know exist, pressing new biological ideas, and got to meet a lot of new professors (including my current advisor)! These classes are really great for narrowing down your interests, and have even led to people starting in a lab their freshman year or finding a SURF, Caltech’s summer research program.

Research Tutorials

While research tutorials aren’t always meant for first-year students, there’s a great way to go in depth into a topic you’re interested in. They’re usually rather different than normal classes—for one, the people who teach it are usually not professors and instead work in a Caltech research facility or are postdocs. They’re also usually all structured differently in regards to lectures and homework. My research tutorial in microbiology was 3 units, meaning that about 3 hours of work a week was expected, and 1.5 of those hours were lecture time. We also had presentations in which we dived deeper into a topic in microbiology we were interested in. I did a presentation on microbial interactions as well as a super cool technique called bacterial merFISH, which enables very precise resolution of cell RNA under the microscope. This class was really fun to me in learning so many exciting things about the world of microbiology, and I’m super glad I took it.

All in all, I had a great time taking these more “nontraditional” courses at Caltech. I learned a whole lot and was able to see things I wouldn’t have been able to in normal lecture-based classes. Just remember when registering for courses, there’s a lot of interesting little ones out there that could change your life!