FSEM Courses

Cryptology is the area of mathematics that studies cryptography, the art of encrypting messages, and crypt-analysis, the science of breaking encrypted messages. This first-year seminar studies these ideas broadly through mathematical explorations accessible to the inquisitive student with only basic algebra skills.

This course examines how commerce has been conducted in the past and present. Students will review the evolution of commerce and will review, discuss, and theorize how it will change in the future. Students will evaluate historic and current patterns of trade, research the potential of expected changes to the business environment, and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of a potential change.

When you play a game, like poker or chess, the outcome depends on what you do, but it also depends on what the other players do. Many real-life situations can also be characterized this way.

To survive today’s increasingly complex and volatile world, we each should develop financial literacy.  While auditing was originally the sub-discipline of accounting dedicated to expressing an opinion as to the fairness of corporate financial statements, it has now become the art and science of gathering evidence for a host of different disciplinary objectives. 

Is science going too far? Is it pushing the boundaries of what should be done by what can be done? This FSEM will examine some of the greatest scientific advances in the last 50 years, the impacts they had on society, and the cost of these advancements.

We don’t have to look far today to find scientific issues viewed as controversial or with distrust—vaccines, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and climate change, just to name a few.

This class examines earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and related hazards, caused by motion of earth’s tectonic plates. We will explore well-known disasters, and examine why they were so destructive.