UW-Madison FIGs

12/19/2025

Celebrating 25 years of FIGs at UW-Madison!

As the First-Year Interest Groups (FIGs) program celebrates a quarter of a century, we look back at how this life-changing program has made an impact on…

12/19/2024

FIG students make friends and learn about the social and cultural dimensions of map-making in "Mapping our Changing World"

 Posted in Faculty, Students, Teaching Mapping Our Changing World: Building a Cartographic Community with First Year Students  Author: jgruley  Published Date: December 18, 2024 Professor Bill Limpisathian “It was written in my contract,” Professor Bill Limpisathian told me when I asked him h...

07/09/2024

Interested in ancient sports? Game creation? Italian food? Protest? THOR? Explore these topics (and others) while hitting your First-Year goals by joining one of UW-Madison FIGs' First-Year Interest Groups.

FIGs provide you with a cohort of similarly-interested First-Year Badgers, so you'll have classmates to connect with right away, ! Learn more at figs.wisc.edu/catalog.

06/04/2024

SOAR 2024 ~ Take a FIG ~ figs.wisc.edu

12/01/2023

Students having an amazing experience in their Fall Food Cultures of Italy FIG!

"Taste of Sicily" hands-on cooking class at Babcock Kitchen Lab on 11/30/2023. Menu: Caponata (eggplant appetizer served on bread); Arancini (ham and cheese filling); Arancine (meat filling); Pasta alla Norma (sedani pasta with eggplant and ricotta salata); Pasta con broccoli arriminati (bucatini pa...

11/17/2023

An excellent article about one of our Fall 2023 FIGs.

Jordan Ellenberg’s parked in a chair at the front of the room in Sterling Hall, gesturing earnestly as 16 freshmen furrow their brows and listen to his observations on one of their classmates’ works.

10/13/2023

A fantastic event for Fall 2023 FIG students!

Ten years after it first cut through Lake Mendota, a traditional birchbark canoe returned to the water, paddled by its maker, Wayne Valliere, who shared the experience with members of a first-year experience group focused on Indigenous arts and science.

02/20/2023

The staff of the First-Year Interest Groups Program mourns the loss of Chancellor Emerita Rebecca Blank. She was a strong advocate for high quality undergraduate teaching, and she was particularly interested in fostering programs and pathways to support students from low income and first-generation backgrounds. She was a dedicated supporter of the FIGs Program and we send our condolences to her family and close friends. The many good things she set in motion here at UW-Madison will continue to positively impact the lives of students, staff, and faculty for years to come.

09/21/2022

Thanks for the FIGs shoutout!

University of Wisconsin-Madison

06/13/2022

Check out this exciting new research from Fall 2022 FIG Professor Hiroshi Maeda's lab:

If scientists could add a trait like this to crops or drug-producing plants, it could help them produce more chemicals naturally while reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

11/18/2021

Check out this feature story on the creative use of video games in our long-running "World of the Vikings" FIG!

For years, Mellor, a distinguished teaching faculty member with the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+ Studies, would begin his popular World of the Sagas course, a First-Year Interest Group (FIG) based on the legends and lore of Iceland and the Vikings, by asking his students to read poems an...

07/15/2021

Are you looking to join a FIG for your first semester at UW? Do you have an interest in computer science, environmentalism, or problem-solving? FIG 20: Games and the Environment may be a good fit! This FIG uses game design to give students new ways of grappling with large-scale environmental concerns. Students will practice making arguments using game-design-based processes rather than words as they consider issues such as: How do we understand complex systems? What is the environmental cost of computing? How can we simulate artificial life? And broadly, how can we best represent the more than human world digitally? Enrolled students will work through these questions in the main seminar class as well as in an environmental literature class and a geography course on global environmental issues. Check out the full details on the FIGs website: https://figs.wisc.edu/fig/wdt_column_filter[fig]=2021fall20