First Year Student Registration

Welcome from President Daniel H. Weiss and Provost Wendy Hill

As you look through this Web site to decide which courses will begin your study at Lafayette, we hope that you will keep the bigger view in mind as well. While these selections will be the focus of your initial academic endeavors, the attitude and expectation that you bring to the experience may be even more important than the subject matter itself.

Your four years at Lafayette will be a time of discovery and personal transformation. Choose to live it fully, to explore, to learn, to be challenged and in so doing become productive citizens and leaders. You’ve chosen one of the country’s premier liberal arts colleges, which also has the unique advantage of a nationally ranked engineering division. You have stepped into a community of exceptional scholars who are committed to you as individual learners.

The ideals of a liberal arts education can be traced to ancient Greece when the challenge was to create a self-governing nation populated by people from many cultures. You know, having grown up in a digital world, that now our society is driven by technology and by its ever-increasing multicultural nature. These forces have impacted undergraduate liberal arts colleges as well but the essential goal of providing students with knowledge, values, and skills that will prepare them for active and effective participation in society remain the same. Honing your capacity to learn, to reason, and to communicate with proficiency will make you the kind of problem-solvers needed to assess situations and make quick judgments and to select and evaluate information critically.

As you develop a better understanding of your self as well as your own culture, you will be developing your capacity to understand and interact with people from other cultures.

We welcome you to the Lafayette community and urge you to seek out and take advantage of the many opportunities for one-on-one research with faculty, independent study guided by a faculty member, and the myriad student life and cultural activities that integrate your residential and academic experience.

Go to Registration Instructions