Title: First Year Experience Programs
Title: Hot Topics

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Girl In Translation

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Previous Common Texts used by Wright State University
  • Nickel and Dimed '03 - '04
  • Let Your Life Speak '04 - '05
  • Eagle's Shadow '05 - '07
  • Inconvenient Truth '07 - '08
  • Freakonomics '08 - '09
  • Three Cups of Tea '09 - '10
  • A Long Way Gone '10 - '11
  • Zeitoun '11-'12

Common Text Program

The Common Reading Program is an essential piece of your First Year Experience at Wright State University. It was developed:

  • To expose you to our academic atmosphere from the time you arrive on campus for Orientation
  • To provide a common academic experience for all first-year students by giving you the opportunity to engage with your peers in intellectual discussions both inside and outside the classroom.
  • To communicate the expectation that you will begin to read actively and critically, make judgments about the validity of what you read and be able to discuss challenging, sometimes conflicting, ideas.

You will also be provided with a series of interconnected academic and beyond-the-classroom activities that will challenge your critical thinking and evaluation of the text through your Learning Community and in many of your General Education courses.

We ask you to become an active member of the Raider community from the start by participating in this shared reading experience, discussing a controversial book, considering the issues it raises, formulating your own views, and sharing them with your teachers and classmates.

Common Text 2012

Book for Common text--Girl In Translation-- Learn more!
Girl In Translation

Girl In Translation

by Jean Kwok

Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, Girl in Translation is an inspiring debut about a young immigrant in America, a smart girl who, living a double life between school and sweatshop, understands that her family’s future is in her hands. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she straddles.

Essay Contest

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Common Text 2011

Book for Common text--A Long Way Gone-- Learn more!
Zeitoun

Zeitoun

by David Eggers

Zeitoun follows the experiences of Syrian-born, Muslim-American building and painting contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who remains in New Orleans during Hurrican Katrina in order to care for his clients' properties. During the days following the storm, Zeitoun saves the lives of trapped people and animals before being profiled (as an Al Qaeda terrorist!) and arrested by armed Homeland Security contract forces. He is effectively "disappeared" for weeks until a brave and compassionate prision chaplain smuggles word out to his frantic wife and children.

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