UW Early Fall Start

Early Fall Start allows incoming first-year students to enroll in an intensive University of Washington course and begin their college experience about a month before the regular school year begins. Early Fall Start is a unique opportunity — to make friends, to take a special course not offered during the school year, and to learn what college life is all about. Learn more at:

Video Transcript:

[Kevin]
You don't really come to a university just to take classes, you come to be in a room with interesting and important faculty, and with students who have similar experiences to you to have engaging conversations and to sort of figure out what path you're going to take in the world.

Early Fall Start is an intensive, four-week introduction to the university, specifically designed for new freshmen, and it consists of two kinds of classes. One is what we call discovery seminars and those are sort of intensive deep dives into a particular topic or discipline, and then we also have a set of classes that focus on English language skills and writing.

[Victor]
At the high school that I went to, there wasn't much choice in your classes. But I was able to, in EFS take this, like crime scene investigation course. So it's more of just a time to explore something that looks fun and entertaining.

[Yurong]
I didn't take AP language classes in high school so I wanted to take an English course before college actually starts because I feel like I'll need the writing skills. My grammar definitely improved a lot from writing like seven essays in four weeks.

[Kevin]
Even though Early Fall Start takes place in summer, those credits count as part of the autumn schedule. So those five credits taken in Early Fall Start mean you can take fewer credits in the autumn quarter, or you can take a full load in autumn quarter and be five credits ahead.

[Yurong]
I would definitely recommend Early Fall Start to all the incoming freshmen because it's just, it was a great experience. You get to experience college before college starts. You'll know your way around before everyone else and you'll make friends and you'll be less, I guess overwhelmed and stressed during your first quarter.

[Victor]
I was maybe a little more hesitant coming from a smaller high school setting, being like, around so many different new people. But, like everybody's super nice, super involved in the class. It's less of like a big, intimidating lecture with a professor, and more of you're coming and hanging out with these, like really cool people doing studies in fields you never knew much about, and get to hear about what they've been doing, do it yourself, and then like you still have a lot of free time.

[Kevin]
Early Fall Start is very unique in that way, to start off your career in a small seminar with a small group of students just like you who are going through the same experience, starting college.

They feel like when they get to the start of what would be the very beginning of their academic career in late September, they actually already are a part of that community. They already know their way around, they're connected there, they're already Huskies by the time everyone else is just beginning. That belongingness goes a long way to connecting them to everything else that's happening on campus.