Sitting in lecture once again, as the professor’s voice slowly morphs into robotic monotone, you slide down in your seat, marinating in your own boredom. Scanning the shout-outs, you find a good one about someone’s winter break hookup being her history TA, but looking around, you don’t see anyone you know who will really appreciate it. Or a friend to copy notes from. Or a friend to talk about what will be on the exam.

Such a disappointing situation would be altogether avoided with a First-Year Interest Group because you would know at least 20 students in the lecture. If FIGs were as accessible and appetizing to University of Wisconsin students as their fruit counterparts are to South American primates, this university would be a much better learning community.

Those who didn’t participate in the orgy of fun and academic achievement that comes with a FIG really missed out.

For those who don’t know, a FIG is a group of three different classes taken in a semester by a group of 20 or so freshmen that are linked by a common theme. Each group attends the same lecture and discussion sections, thus creating connections between classes and classmates. What FIGs give is a small-college feel to an impersonal, large campus that makes some people feel alone. However, FIGs are not just for those too timid to take classes on their own. FIGs initially were designed to have students of many different walks of life cross paths for three classes their first semester, allowing for each person’s voice to be heard — however loud or quiet that voice was. FIGs are meant to connect the otherwise unconnected.

With a FIG in your schedule, it feels like you’re almost back in middle school, traveling from class to class, in cliques and clusters reminiscent of adolescence. But now these college-age clusters have less acne and more real-world problems to deal with — hopefully. FIGs allow students to form study partnerships and groups of friends so the result is that classes actually become easier and more interesting. It’s not uncommon for a group of FIG friends, dubbed “figs” or “figgas” if they so choose, to reference material learned in their classes outside of class either in relaxed social situations or in search of clarification within study groups.

It almost becomes impossible not to make connections between classes within a FIG, and that’s why these small, intimate communities have proven so effective. Statistics boast FIG participants perform better academically and integrate into college better socially than non-FIG students. The FIG class of fall 2007 finished the semester with an average GPA of 3.3, compared to the non-FIG 3.09 GPA. The results are even seen throughout these FIG participants’ college careers, as more graduate with better GPAs than those who weren’t in a FIG.

It seems an ideal college experience would include a FIG-like group of classes every semester throughout a student’s college career. So then why can these class-clusters only be taken in the first semester?

The First-Year Interest Group Program would likely respond saying that class-clusters would be unnecessary once a student has been in college for a semester, and the organization of the classes is time-consuming and expensive. However, the benefits of such classes seem almost too great to deny to students.

What FIGs are successful in doing is not dividing students into class groups based on their interests but creating opportunities for students to learn in a way that better resembles real life. In FIGs students are able to discuss openly, work together, create connections, and think about their classes somewhere other than on their rusting lecture chairs.

Expanding the FIG program should not only be a practice of the university to show how they are integrating diversity or helping freshman adjust to college life but a priority to create a better academic community. Doing so may take more time in the office organizing and may take more out of the pockets of the professors paid to teach and organize FIGs, but if students are learning more and are graduating at higher numbers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because of it, it is a worthy investment. FIGs started simply as a part of Plan 2008, but the idea of FIGs should be extended not only to serve the needs of diversity but also to help students succeed in the college education that they are paying for.

Patrick Johnson ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in English and journalism.