King’s renowned first-year experience takes students on an epic journey through literature exploring philosophy, history, drama, natural and social sciences.
Apply Now Admission requirements
Ask a recruiter Future students events
How the program works FYP & your degree
Request Information All About FYP webinar
A year that changes your life
At King’s, education is not only able to inform, but to transform. Your transformation begins with King’s Foundation Year Program, an exceptional first year in your four-year degree.
The Foundation Year Program (FYP)—a different approach to your first year of university
The Foundation Year Program is largely a journey through the past, but its goal is to help you understand our contemporary world more deeply. This interdisciplinary program is an ‘odyssey’—a journey that takes you and your fellow travellers to thought-provoking, unfamiliar places, but one that ultimately brings you home.
This journey happens through a chronological study of great books and ideas, from the ancient to the contemporary world. You’ll get a broad understanding of important intellectual developments—in philosophy, history, literature, drama, and the natural and social sciences.
How the Foundation Year Program works
Mornings
Most days, you attend morning lectures with the entire first-year class. The lecture is delivered by one of King’s or Dalhousie’s faculty experts, who provides clarity around the day’s reading and explains the historical importance of the work.
Afternoons
You spend an hour in small discussion groups (called “tutorials”) led by faculty (your “tutors”) with about 15 others to discuss the books you’re reading. Your tutors are skilful discussion leaders who facilitate tutorial discussion, and they help you develop your writing, critical thinking, and oral communication skills.
Assignment types
You’ll write papers approximately every two weeks. You’ll take oral exams in December and April in which you’ll use your burgeoning oral communication skills to answer questions, and reconstruct, synthesize and assemble an understanding of what you’ve read. You’ll begin to communicate more clearly and persuasively, which will set you up to succeed in your second, third and fourth year of your degree. You’ll gradually gain the freedom not only to engage with the world, but also to change it.
There are no textbooks. You form your own interpretations of classic books aided by faculty experts bringing them to life through lectures and tutorials.
The books challenge you. The process of reading and discussing them in a guided community of your peers will help you understand and appreciate their significance. The result is that you become a more knowing, critical and thoughtful individual within your community.
“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”
Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian media theorist
“Like the fish, we swim in our own culture, made up of a whole series of assumptions—assumptions that we need to step away from in order to see and understand. The Foundation Year Program (FYP) offers you the chance to take a year, to join a community of thought and imagination in trying to “see” the water in which we are all swimming.
In FYP, our stepping away takes the form of a journey that begins in Ur (the very first city known to humanity) and arrives, by the end of the year, in the place we all start from—the contemporary world. … And, as in any journey, we are called upon to notice what is different, to think new thoughts and imagine other worlds—and in so doing, come to experience our own context differently, with greater insight and a sense of possibility. Yet we will, in so doing, “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”—for in a way, what we are studying is our own place: the sources, cross-currents, springs and eddies that make up the water in which we live…” Dr. Neil Robertson, Director, Foundation Year Program – read Dr. Robertson’s full letter
