RC Program Requirements

RC Early Momentum

Take at least one RC course in each of your first four semesters. RCCORE 100 doesn't count toward it, but nearly everything else does: RC language courses, RC forums, any RC course of any type.

• It's less extra work than it sounds. RC courses count toward LSA Distribution and toward your major and minor, so most students meet this with classes they'd be taking anyway. What you get for it is two years of actually sampling what the RC offers, instead of finding out late.
• The timing matters for a more practical reason too. Those four semesters are the same two years you're living in East Quad and most RC classes meet in that building. Take them now, and the walk to class is a flight of stairs, which means you can wake up 5 minutes before it starts. Take them later, after you've moved off campus, and you're crossing campus in Snow for a class you could have had downstairs.

First-Year Writing Seminar (FYWS)

• LSA requirement: a first-year seminar in rhetorical and analytical writing.

• In the RC: 
  • you take yours in the RC, capped at 15 students, with only RC students in the room. Topics range widely, so you can pick one you're curious about instead of one you can put up with. Because everyone in the seminar is also in the RC, it's usually where you start meeting the people you'll be living and taking classes with for the next two years. The work is built around reflection, revision, and discussion, usually on a personalized topic, rather than one-shot papers.
  • Fulfills the LSA First-Year Writing requirement, and the Honors First-Year Writing requirement.

Language Proficiency

• LSA requirement: 16 credits, usually four semesters, of language study in a regular classroom.

• In the RC: 
  • semi-immersion sequences in Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Japanese. 
    • Most students reach proficiency in fewer semesters than the LSA route takes, and the RC sequence satisfies the LSA requirement either way. 
    • The semi-immersion part is what happens outside of lecture. Every RC language program runs a lunch table and a coffee hour where you use the language with peers, faculty, and whoever else shows up.
      

Creative Expression/Arts Practicum

• LSA requirement: one course in creative expression, theory applied through practice.
• In the RC:
  • Arts Practicum totaling 3 credits. The course lists overlap heavily with LSA's, so what mostly changes is where you're doing the work: in the RC, with RC faculty, in RC arts spaces, next to people from your program. Plenty of students take one and keep going, into more RC arts courses or into the Arts & Ideas major.
  • RC music, drama, and visual arts courses all count, as do approved University of Michigan courses. Fulfills LSA's Creative Expression requirement.

Additional RC Requirements

Two more, beyond the requirements above:

• If your major is outside the RC, you take four additional RC courses. These can double as LSA distribution. If your major is in the RC, this one doesn't apply to you.
• You live in East Quad with the RC community for your first two years, with priority housing.

Advising & Support

• You finish the same degree requirements as any LSA student: distribution, race & ethnicity, quantitative reasoning, upper-level writing.

• What's different is proximity. RC Academic Services is in East Quad, in the building where you live, so advising is a walk down the hall instead of a trip across campus or weeks of waiting. Advisors and peer advisors work with you from orientation through graduation on majors, requirements, schedules, life transitions, and anything academic that isn't going the way you hoped.