Spring Term Immersion

Imagine that you could take one unique course for four weeks, exploring a topic in depth with one of the world's leading experts, working intensely alongside your fellow students and your professor. That's the essence of the W&L Spring Term. The W&L faculty have created over 200 new, intensive courses that are designed only for the four-week term.

These courses were set up with the "dream class" concept in mind: we asked the faculty, "if you could teach the course of your dreams, what would it be?" The courses that have been created are remarkable examples of creative and expansive teaching: studying painting in Italy - the Freedom Rides throughout the Civil Rights South - the Physics of Music - code-breaking in mathematics and history - the politics of Barack Obama - the stem cell controversy - and many, many more. These courses are designed to be transformative learning experiences. Our goal is for students to exclaim after taking a spring term course, "this course changed my life."

That's a tall order, an ambitious aim--indeed, this is virtually unprecedented in higher education today. The W&L Spring Term complements our two regular long terms in the fall and winter. In those terms, students get an elite educational experience on par with the best offered by any liberal arts college in America. In the Spring Term, our students get an intensive, focused learning experience that is unique in American higher learning. The combination of breadth and depth makes the W&L experience a superb way of learning the world of the 21st century.