So how does it work?
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You’ll choose three Core Seminars at intervals, the first of which will help you make the transition to college-level reading, writing, thinking and presentation skills.  The seminars are thematic, designed to engage you with facets of the world in which you live, including the one in your head. This first one asks the question “Who am I?”  Others encourage you to explore your relationship to the world and your service to others. See the Freshman Core Seminars below.

As you progress through the core, you will focus on outcomes:  critical inquiry, information literacy, communication (written, oral and quantitative), global awareness, vocation (your calling). You get to choose the courses that will help you meet those outcomes, from both the core and your major.  You’ll have a wide variety of core courses to choose from, and you’ll select them to broaden and deepen your understanding of:

• The natural world
• Society and human behavior
• The arts
• Faith and meaning

The Core is flexible, designed to allow you to select what interests you most while you gain competency and intellectual depth in key areas.  Competencies matter, but it is Grand View’s emphasis on the whole person – the transformation of mind, body and spirit – that empowers you to succeed in a career and in your life.

CHECKLIST

You'll begin your journey through the core with your first seminar, which will strengthen your critical thinking and writing abilities, and also help support your transition to university-level course work.  See your choices HERE.

Core Seminar II
This course will challenge you to wrestle with difference, bias, and perspective through an Immersion Project within a local or global community.  Immersion Projects are off-campus educational service opportunities at selected sites that pertain to the planned learning and serve a need. You and your team will serve in a community different from your own for 15-20 hours of service; each project seeks to foster understanding between the students from the university community and the host community around specified themes.  By working alongside people and sharing their stories, you'll learn to think differently about yourself, the community, and the world.  In the process, you'll engage important questions about life commitment and meaning as you prepare to transition from Grand View to a life of work and service.  

You will:

• Engage diverse perspectives to gain a more complex understanding of the human experience.
• Accept that your own views are not inherently privileged and learn to value understanding the views of others.
• Understand how identity and beliefs are shaped by social forces.
• Interact with a diverse array of views that foster understanding and self-awareness.

Core Seminar III
You'll explore the multi-faceted ways you are called to lead a life of ethical service to others.  You'll read and respond to material exploring how each of us is called to connect our gifts, passions and abilities to serving needs in the world. Materials, assignments and discussions will highlight what it means to live out our vocations ethically in many dimensions of life.
 
You'll write three self-reflection papers answering these questions:

• Paper 1: What have been the formative experiences in learning, work and service that have shaped your sense of vocation?
• Paper 2: How have you prepared yourself to fulfill your vocation and meet the needs of others in the world?   
• Paper 3:  What is your calling at this moment in life and how do you see your preparation and ethical commitments empowering you to fulfill it? Paper 3 will be a written statement of vocation that integrates insights and ideas from the first two reflective learning papers.  It will include a statement of vocation that clearly articulates your vision for how you will ethically fulfill a need in society.

Finally, you'll present your own Statement on "vocation" in a three minute oral presentation to the class.

CHECKLIST

Transfer students enter Grand View with varying amounts of credit previously earned.  Based on that number of credits, the number of “encounters” with the essential core competencies can be decreased:

• 0-27 credits transferred: 4 encounters with each competency are required. 
• 28-59 credits transferred: 3 encounters with each competency are required. 
• 60-89 credits transferred: 2 encounters with each competency are required.
• 90+ credits transferred: 1 encounter with each competency are required.

Core Seminars
Students transferring to Grand View with 20 credits or more are exempt from Core
Seminar 1. Students transferring to Grand View with a Bachelor’s Degree are exempt from Core Seminars 1 & 2.

Articulation
Transferred courses will be evaluated individually to satisfy requirements within the “Ways of Knowing” categories.  Articulation Agreements are established with several community colleges to outline how these classes transfer. You can review those HERE.

Students transferring to Grand View with an Associate of Arts degree or a Bachelor’s degree will satisfy these categories as follows: 

Associate of Arts Degree
The Associate of Arts degree (AA) satisfies the Grand View University General Education Core requirements for the baccalaureate degree except for the composition and quantitative reasoning courses (unless fulfilled by transfer coursework), Core Seminars II and III, and the required number of outcome iterations (number determined by class status on entry to the University; see General Education Core section of the catalog for further details.)  The student must have graduated from an accredited institution and earned a 2.0 cumulative grade point average on a 4.0 system based on work completed at all institutions attended, and have satisfied Grand View's composition and quantitative reasoning courses.  Students holding Associate in Arts degrees from accredited institutions based outside the United States are required to satisfy Grand View's composition and quantitative reasoning courses.  The maximum number of transfer credits accepted from junior/community colleges is 66 semester hours. All junior/community college transfer credit is considered lower division credit.  Students holding any Associate's degree other than an Associate of Arts degree are not exempt from the general degree requirements

Bachelor of Arts Degree
Students holding a baccalaureate degree or higher from an accredited instituion based in the United States are considered to have fulfilled all Grand View University General Education Core requirements except for the completion of one interation of each of the Core outcomes and Core Seminar III. Students holding baccalaureate degrees from accredited institutions based outside the United States are frequently considered to have fulfilled all General Education Core requirements except for the completion of one iteration of each of the Core outcomes, Core Seminar III, and composition, though Grand View reserves the right to make a determination of comparability.  To earn the additional degree, students must complete the following: 30-hour residency requirement, one interation of each outcome, Core Seminar III, requisite courses for the major, and prerequisites for those courses.