Intensive Freshman Seminars: Indiana University Bloomington

Welcome to Intensive Freshman Seminars

IFS, a program offered by the Undergraduate Education Transition to College Office, is a fantastic way to step into life at IU Bloomington before the fall semester even begins. With IFS, you will move into your dorm on campus early to work with leading faculty in a 3-credit course, create your first college friendships, immerse yourself in unique programming designed to connect you with IU's extensive resources, and prepare yourself for life at college.

IFS 2025 takes place from August 3rd to August 20th, right before the fall semester begins. The program begins with a week of virtual classes starting on August 3th. IFS students move to campus on August 10th, and in-person class meetings begin on August 11th.

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Your success at IU begins here

At IFS, you'll have the opportunity to:

Connect with a top professor
Participate in a small and rigorous college class
Learn alongside other incoming first-year students & create lasting friendships
Explore the IU Bloomington campus
Discover opportunities for leadership, service, and study

Connect with faculty

Learn from one of Indiana University's leading faculty members in a small classroom setting. Because IFS classes are small, students have the chance to work individually with their professor and make personal relationships with faculty. With classes in a variety of subjects and unique co-curricular opportunities, there's an IFS class for every type of student.

Create friendships

When you attend IFS, you aren't just academically successful, you're socially involved too. You will participate in a variety of activities and events while exploring campus and making friends with new and returning IU students. Meet other students before coming to campus at IFS virtual events and have a blast at our program-wide events. Experiences aren't limited to what happens in the classroom. At IFS, you'll never be bored.

2025 IFS Course Spotlights

See the full list of 2025 IFS courses to learn more and meet the IFS faculty. Identify your top four course preferences and submit your IFS application!

Music and the Mind

Andrew Goldman

Learn to listen in a whole new way through the science of music cognition! This course is not just for people with musical training, but for anyone interested in the mental workings of music. You'll gain technical and practical understanding of the methods of music cognition, including learning about how researchers create controlled experiments on music.

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Vikings and Sagas: Primary Sources vs. Popular Culture

Lane Sorensen

The past couple of decades have seen a spike in portrayals of Vikings in a variety of media from television and movies to comic books, manga, and video games. But who were the Vikings? Do the images of the Vikings in your head match up with the facts, and is their portrayal in popular culture at all rooted in reality? This course is designed to answer these and other questions regarding the history, literature, language, and culture of the Vikings.

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Food for Thought: Food Systems from Local to Global

Andrew Libby

The essential question of this course is: Why do people eat what they eat? In an effort to answer this question, we will examine a variety of economic, ecological, sociological and political dimensions of food in local, national, and global contexts. Our hope is to understand and unravel the complex structural mechanisms that determine what food we grow, how we grow it, where it goes, at what cost, and what it looks like when it eventually arrives on the table.

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Explore our courses

Check out the exciting topics you can study in IFS.

Courses

Reserve your spot

Complete the IFS application to register for IFS 2025.

Apply now