First3

Originally established in 1995 as PET (Project for Effective Teaching), First3, which has evolved continuously over the years, is designed to offer pedagogical insight and professional support to all faculty and fellows in their first three years at Williams.

The heart of the First3 program resides in its weekly lunches, which are informal and relatively unstructured, where we discuss a vast array of topics around teaching, both in general and as they relate to our particular classrooms and to our scholarly work.  Periodically, we also invite guests who are important campus resources to talk with us about the services they offer or the ways in which their offices support our scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work.

Participation in First3 is entirely voluntary: Faculty members may attend as much or as little as they like and the nature of the program is fundamentally non-evaluative.  Its principal goals are to make available a forum for instructors to discuss pedagogy, scholarly work, and professional development with more seasoned colleagues as well as one another, and to foster opportunities for faculty to establish valuable mentoring and support networks through which to continue to grow as members of the Williams academic community.

First3 Coordinators

Matt Carter is Associate Professor of Biology.

Nicole Mellow is Professor of Political Science. Her research interests are in the field of American political development. She is currently working on a project on eugenics, national identity, and state building at the beginning of the twentieth century, tentatively titled, How White Ethnics Got Themselves a New Deal: Nation Building and the Interventionist State, 1900 to 1940.

Amy Holzapfel is Professor of Theatre.

In addition to facilitating the regular weekly First 3 lunches, Matt, Nicole, and Amy also help coordinate the NFD all-faculty lunches.

First3 Weekly Lunches for New Faculty

All faculty in their first three years at Williams, including pre-tenure faculty, visitors, artists in residence, Mellon post-doctorate fellows, Bolin fellows, are invited to participate in the First3 Lunch Schedule. Lunches are on Mondays and Thursdays, 12-1:15PM, in the Faculty House. These are informal lunches and people are invited to come to all of them or some of them, and to come late or leave early as needed. Lunches, covered by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, provide an opportunity to meet people and to ask questions, to discuss teaching, scholarship and/or creative endeavors, as well as how to balance it all. More topical or thematic discussions may also be scheduled and announced via email and on this web site’s events section.

For more information, contact Coordinators Matt Carter, Nicole Mellow or Amy Holzapfel.