Residential Life & Explorations
RCC Courses
Learn more about what to expect from your first semester at Rollins and how we can help!

Learning Together
Rollins believes that a liberal arts education should be practical (applied), that students learn best by doing, and that classes are most impactful when students and faculty learn together.
Rollins College Conferences
In addition to taking exploratory courses in Foundations, your first semester at Rollins will include a Rollins College Conference, or RCC. In your RCC, you'll encounter your Peer Mentors who are sophomore, junior, and senior students who will guide you through your transition to Rollins. The RCC is a seminar class in which approximately 16 students meet with a faculty member to explore a topic in the professor's area of expertise. The professors are drawn from the full range of academic disciplines encompassing the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
RCCs are generally not connected to a specific major, so you should feel free to explore a topic that truly interests you.
We live in a new era of scientific discovery. Gravitational waves produced by black hole collisions relay messages from the other side of the Universe, systems of planets and moons have been detected around a host of stars, and galaxies race away from us as the fabric of spacetime expands. NASA and private companies are poised to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time in more than forty years. The next generation of space capsules and rockets will soon carry humans from right here in Florida. In this course, we will learn the basics of astronomy, as well as explore the history and future of NASA.
What is youth and youth culture? How to define and characterize them? How does youth culture evovle from generation to generation? We are going to use Chinese youth and youth culture as a case study to explore how they evolved over time in the changing histoical cotext. Students are encouraged to bring their own experiences and reflect upon their similaritis and differences with those of their Chinese counterparts.
"Our lives are filled with moral dilemmas; daily we are confronted with ethical questions about how to act in our personal lives and in the world as responsible and engaged citizens. This course will provide grounding in ethics and moral theory and an overview of the most current and controversial issues in applied social and political ethics. We will study moral theories and frameworks that justify moral judgments. And we will examine debates for and against certain particular issues such as abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, immigration, healthcare as a right, multiculturalism and women’s rights, food politics, and world hunger relief.
We will address questions about our individual responsibility and positions, as well as our social and political responsibilities as global citizens, such as: What shall we do? How to act rightly? Is the death
penalty immoral? What are the salient issues behind the abortion debate? Should we lend a hand to the destitute and impoverished abroad, even if we don’t know them? Should politicians be permitted to act immorally, i.e., by allowing torture, if by doing so they will save the life of millions? Are we ever justified in disobeying the law? What about patently unjust laws? Do we have a moral right to impede immigrants from entering our borders? These issues currently motivate heated debates. In this class, we will try to understand the analytical and reasoned arguments often invoked to justify or reject them. Many of those arguments are oftentimes used (in a simplified fashion) in the political arena or the media more generally. By taking this course, you should expect to learn how to argue more effectively for and against a moral position, as well as to understand the theoretical moral framework underlying the position, and to apply theoretical frameworks to contemporary political and ethical issues."
develops writing, speaking, and reading skills through the study of grammar and oral exercises. The course emphasizes all four language skills: speaking, listening, writing, and reading. This course fulfills the “F” general education requirement. "
This class offers a comprehensive review of elementary Spanish with a focus on building communication skills and learning about the Spanish-speaking world. The class is for non-native speakers of Spanish who have taken the equivalent of three years of High School Spanish, but who need more practice before proceeding to an intermediate-level course. The class will be fast paced and will be taught in Spanish to provide an immersive language-learning experience.
Prerequisite: No more than 3 years of high school Spanish