Issue Addressed The department and CID team are attempting to address the first-year experience, which has been deemed especially important in the intellectual and professional development of the graduate student. Currently the department has a proseminar to introduce first year students to the department, broad historiographical debates, issues of professionalization, and the future of the discipline. The concern is that the first-year graduate students are not getting an early enough introduction to focused historiographical debates and research.

Issues The arguments for the proposal derive in part from past Proseminar evaluations. These indicated that the proseminar was a popular way for students to meet each other, the faculty, and learn about nuts-and-bolts issues of professionalization, library use, funding, etc. Students seemed to feel its specific discussions of reading and historiography were less successful because of the size of the course and because the readings proposed by faculty who came in to visit were not always addressed in the class discussion which followed.

Change or Innovation The department intends to address this issue by instituting a "two-term first year sequence involving a team taught--or two-section concurrent--historiography seminar followed by a research seminar--also possibly team taught or broken into two concurrent sections. Running concurrent with the historiography course (and possibly also research seminar) would be a bi-weekly meeting, also required, that would address some of the professionalization and meet-the-faculty functions previously addressed sucessfully by the proseminar.

Reasons for Approach The CID team selected this approach in order to sustain excitement in the discipline, as well as introduce students to the "hands on" practice of history earlier.

Intended Effect The projected effects of this innovation include: richer and longer first-year experience, which would foster esprit de corps among the incoming class, better trained students able to do research earlier, faster professionalization, and the production of a research proposal that would be the basis for a research project in the second semester of the first year sequence.

Data or Evidence Faculty and student feedback, progress through program, and students' evaluations will demonstrate the success of this innovation.