This year, ACU blessed the freshman class with a revamped U100 course: CORE, The Question of Truth. As a freshman, I am especially grateful for the change. It means a lot to me to see the great efforts ACU made to create a course so beneficial to my academic career as well as my life.

I can only imagine the level of training the professors must have gone through before being permitted to teach “The Question of Truth.” Surely there were extensive exercises to help teachers disregard any opinions they once held true, and their success provides a sense of mystery to the course: “Will I share my opinions with you? Do I even have any worldviews of my own? Who can tell?” I truly admire the effects of a good, wholesome social persuasion.

The assignments the course requires are extremely enlightening. Many of us, myself included, came to college and realized their worldviews are less than their own, but rather views influenced by others. What better way to discover and form our own worldviews than by writing an essay based on someone else’s, like the spotlight speaker’s? Why bother with personal interactions with the “other” when you can have hypothetical, virtual encounters? Speaking of the others, who are they? No one actually knows. Are they plants? Are they aliens in another country? Are they that group of kids that walk around campus without shoes?

I think it’s safe to say that CORE has greatly benefited me this year. I have been able to make friends in my class through heated arguments as we attempt to push our opinions on each other, and I get to pay enormous amounts of money to hear speakers give their views on the gender of God and tell us we are inherently racist; and nothing thrills me more than to think about the next three semesters in which I can continue the experience. With this in mind, I can only hope my schedule next semester includes CORE: The Question of Falsehood? Because I’m still a little unsure about that one-

-Jennifer Acuff, freshman biology major from College Station