All UC Davis undergraduate students can learn to pick a lock, make a quick getaway and argue their own defense, no heist required, in some of this fall’s First-Year Seminars. Registration is now open for Pass One for next quarter’s lineup of over 70 classes. First Year Seminars provide students with the chance to attend small courses like Locksport: Picking Locks for Fun, High-Performance Driving and Criminal Law and its Processes. 

Seminars like these encourage students to explore how things work in a fun and accessible way to build skills for future careers. 

Education and entertainment

Ian Korf, professor of molecular and cellular biology and instructor of the Locksport: Picking Locks for Fun and High-Performance Driving seminars explained how both courses started off as hobbies for him. He also saw the chance to turn them into enjoyable learning opportunities for students through First-Year Seminars. 

“Entertainment is the best form of education,” Korf said. “The best way to learn something is to make it entertaining because you’ll just want to keep on doing it.”

Fifth-year environmental science and management major, Brett Watson, took High-Performance Driving last winter. He applied the highly technical elements he learned in class on weekdays to achieve faster times on the video game-like racing simulators students could access on the weekends. 

“I learned everything I could about driving,” Watson said. “After a few months of hard work, I achieved a 63-second lap which is considered a highly elite time for these types of racing challenges.”

Korf designed the Locksport course with the same idea in mind: turn something fun into a lesson in problem solving. He described how students are drawn to the seminar because they are excited by the chance to do something they feel they’re not supposed to do. 

“The goal is to hook students with fun,” Korf said. “Soon, they realize how much focus and precision it takes to picture the mechanisms inside the lock as they manipulate the tools on the outside. But by the time they realize the challenge, they already learned how to solve problems through patience and creative thinking.”

Built to inspire

First-Year Seminars, beyond offering fun, invite students to explore advanced or unique topics without prerequisites or pressure. 

UC Davis Professor of Law Irene Joe created Criminal Law and its Processes to give undergraduates — at any level — a glimpse into law school without all the barriers to entry. She hoped for students to experience the pace and discussion of a real law class in an accessible, manageable environment where they can engage with real-world issues.

“I want students to connect what they learn to their own lives,” Joe said. “It helps them to see how legal issues play out beyond the classroom and offers them a real sense of what it is like to study the law.”

Jonathan Lewis, now a first-year law student, took the seminar as an undergrad at UC Davis and said he discovered his passion for law through the First-Year Seminar.

“I’m here today at the UC Davis School of Law because of this seminar,” Lewis said. “First-Year Seminars make these types of topics accessible and let students discover new subjects to see what excites them.”