Photos from the pre-year field trip. Clockwise from top left: Prof. Paul Asimow and company—TA Yuri Tamama riding shotgun—on the road to the Coso geothermal plant, students stand in front of the Earthquake Fault on Mammoth Mountain, and the group poses next to the Crowley Lake Columns. (All photos courtesy of Paul Asimow.)

On a late September morning, a caravan of first-year students and faculty packed into SUVs and headed north along Highway 395. They stopped under the sweeping blades of a Mojave wind farm, peered into boiling geothermal pools on a Navy base, stood among the twisted tufa towers of a Mono Lake, and walked the grounds of the Manzanar incarceration camp. Somewhere between the talk of megawatts and magma chambers, the history of L.A. hydropolitics, and the ethics of locking up your own citizens, the group’s first class quietly started.

This is Caltech’s pilot Integrated Core.

“What’s wrong with Core?”

This fall, Caltech introduced a new first-year track that rethinks how students encounter the Institute’s foundational science curriculum. Instead of taking separate, largely disconnected courses in physics, chemistry, biology, math, and earth science, a small cohort moves through a single, 27-unit block of class organized around one idea: energy.

The program grew out of almost two years of conversations convened by Provost Dave Tirrell and Vice Provost for Education Michelle Effros.

“We were talking about the Core and how to make it more engaging to more students,” Effros recalls. “Some students really appreciate the Core as they’re taking it, and many appreciate it in hindsight. But we wanted to ask: how can we help everyone have the best experience as they’re taking it?”

Faculty across divisions have been noticing two related problems. First, there was “poor retention” of first-year material: students would arrive in upper-level classes having technically passed Ma 1 and Ph 1, for instance, but seemingly unable to recall concepts they’d been tested on only a year or two earlier. Second, says Professor of Geology and Geochemistry Paul Asimow, there was a more intangible loss.

“New Caltech students arrive, and you can see the light in their eyes,” he says. “They’re excited about everything. And by the end of Core, there’s a sense among the faculty that the light goes out. People just do their problem sets each week and lose the excitement.”

One culprit, in the group’s view, was the way traditional Core silos off its components.

“Physics is taught by physicists in isolation from why you’d need to learn physics, chemistry is taught by chemists in isolation from why you’d need chemistry, and so on,” Asimow says. “We wanted to explicitly point out the connections between things and the fact that there is one edifice of science with many pillars. To understand the pillars, you need to step back and see the building.”

Out of that idea came the Integrated Core: a small-cohort, team-taught alternative to standard Core that foregrounds those connections from day one.

Energy, everywhere

Integrated Core on their field trip to the Huntington, in the tropical greenhouse. (Photo: Paul Asimow)

Rather than teaching discrete classes that happen to share a roster, Integrated Core is designed as a single, cross-listed course that stretches across three terms. Its unifying theme is energy—chosen because, as Effros puts it, “it’s very of the moment and does a great job of bringing together lots of different disciplines.”

The year for the plan is as follows: Fall uses space travel as a vehicle for mechanics, fuel chemistry, planetary science, and the search for life. Winter shifts to cellular bioenergetics: how organisms obtain, convert, and store energy. Spring turns to carbon capture and climate, linking spectroscopy, geoscience, and policy.

Professor of Physics Gil Refael is responsible for much of the mechanics content in the fall term. He describes the approach as “more or less the same chapters as a standard university physics book—Newton’s laws, energy, torque, angular momentum, gravity oscillations—but introduced through the question: How do we actually send things to space?”

The result is a similar sequence of topics, although the problems begin to take on a narrative. How do you design an orbit? Okay, but why are orbits closed in a 1/r potential? And so, given that, how do you extract enough energy from chemical bonds to lift a rocket out of Earth’s gravity well?

“The emphasis is less on ‘here’s a method’ and more on ‘here’s the calculation we need to do,’” Refael adds. “If you know the energy function, differentiate it, and you get the equations of motion. It’s an almost-Lagrangian way of teaching mechanics that students usually don’t see until much later.”’

First-year Maxwell Yu, among the 17 students in the inaugural cohort, appreciates the concreteness.

“I’m definitely more of a practical-minded person,” he says. “I don’t really see myself doing space work in the future, but it’s a good basis for understanding the physics, math, and even geology. I like seeing how things are actually useful in the real world.”

Labs: from termites to rotating chairs

The “integration” is perhaps most visible in the lab and problem-set structure. Each week, students tackle three sets: Set A, math and physics; Set B, biology and chemistry; and Set C, explicitly interdisciplinary problems—often where the earth science resides. Graduate TA Yuri Tamama (GPS) describes Set C as “where geology sneaks in, but it depends on the week. Sometimes it’s more geoscience, sometimes more biochem. The point is that it mixes things.”

The labs follow the same philosophy. In the first two weeks alone, students performed a microscopy lab on the microbiome of a termite hindgut, estimating the power required for a microorganism to swim and converting that to ATP consumption; undertook a series of Fermi estimation exercises to develop intuition for length, time, and energy scales; and conducted a density and spectroscopy lab on magnesium, calcium, and strontium carbonates, linking periodic trends to mineral properties.

Later in the term, physics labs on ballistics and rotational dynamics had students 3D-printing spring-loaded cannons and taking turns on spinning chairs to measure moment of inertia.

“For a lot of us, it was like: first week of college, and we’re already using fancy microscopes,” says Yu. “And it wasn’t just biology. We connected it to physics and chemistry in the same week.”

First-year Delta Blendea, who had experienced a humanities-style integrated curriculum in middle school, says this is exactly what they were hoping for on the STEM side.

“It’s really true that things make a lot more sense when you learn about them in different ways,” Blendea says. “The theme is energy, so when we’re dealing with the minutiae of quantum chemistry, we can relate it back to physics—things want to be at lower potential energy, force is the gradient of potential, and so on. Understanding the same idea across fields makes everything click.”

Humanities in orbit

Integrated Core also features a year-long humanities component, taught by Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Jennifer Jahner. For the fall, Prof. Jahner built her syllabus around the legal and ethical questions of extending human communities beyond Earth.

“I’ve been a scholar of law for years,” she says, “and I’m interested in how communities instantiate law where it didn’t exist before. Space travel is a perfect case study: What does it mean to extend human community into an off-Earth environment?”

The major fall project tasks students to imagine themselves in 2040 as an ethics subcommittee advising the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Working in teams, they draft recommendations for updating the Outer Space Treaty for an era with proposed Martian habitats, tackling topics like property rights, bioethics, resource management, and quality of life.

“We had a really spirited discussion of the Honor Code through virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology,” Jahner says. “Part of what I hope to instill is a habit of mind that always looks for the hidden ethical assumptions in a technical project.”

Winter will move students into the Caltech Archives to study the history of hydropower and the growth of Southern California; spring will pivot to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, ideally in collaboration with the Huntington Library, which houses Butler’s papers.

For Integrated Core students, this sequence counts as one of the first-year humanities classes; they still take an additional frosh hum elsewhere in the catalog.

Building a tiny school inside Caltech

Prof. Gil Refael lecturing on angular momentum. (Photo: Paul Asimow)

Running a 27-unit, three-term block for 17 students is logistically intense. The teaching term currently includes ten faculty: Prof. Asimow (GPS), Prof. Refael and other PMA faculty, Prof. Justin Bois and colleagues from BBE, chemists from CCE, Professor of Electrical Engineering Glenn George representing EAS, and Prof. Jahner from HHS, along with a small army of TAs spanning divisions.

“We wanted teaching faculty and research faculty in the same room,” Prof. Asimow notes. “It’s not typical for those groups to co-teach, and it’s been fantastic. The teaching faculty here are really, really good at what they do.”

The group meets weekly—faculty and TAs together—to coordinate lectures, labs, and grading.

Since every week sees new problem sets A, B, and C, the work takes a village. “Someone has to write them, someone has to field-test them, someone has to grade them,” Tamama explains. “It’s interesting being part of building a course from scratch instead of just inheriting old problem sets.”

The TA corps itself is learning as they go. “We’ve had to figure out the balance between recitation, office hours that are general Q&A, and sessions focused on specific problem sets,” Prof. Asimow said. “Many of the TAs are new to TAing, and none of the peer tutors elsewhere on campus have ever taken Integrated Core, so the support structure has to be tailored.”

Even the classroom had to be invented. The Integrated Core cohort currently lives in BBE 1101, a former graduate student lounge reclaimed over the summer. Grad student Jieyu Zhang, who helps run the NeuroTecher group that used to occupy the space, remembers schlepping out couches and inherited furniture.

“Justin [Bois] needs a lounge where professors could work together all day and TAs could have an office space,” she says. “Our club didn’t really need it, so I moved everything out. Now it’s part classroom, part relaxation area. It’s a really nice space with projectors, whiteboards, and lots of room, and I hope the new students enjoy having it.”

According to Blendea, they do.

“There’s the classroom and a lounge right next to it, and basically at all hours there are a couple of people in there working on a set,” they say. “Pretty much always working together—within the Honor Code. It’s been a really close-knit group.”

Who is Integrated Core for?

The program is explicitly an alternative, not a replacement, for standard Core. It’s also not for everyone.

“You can’t test out of physics or math if you do IC,” Blendea points out. “If you’re planning to place out of a bunch of Core, Integrated Core is not for you.”

Because the 27-unit block already folds in physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and part of math, students only have room for Ma 1 and maybe one additional class, like CS 1 or Writing 2.

“There’s definitely less flexibility,” Yu says. “For me, it hasn’t been an issue—I wasn’t planning to take much besides Core anyway—but I’ve heard others struggle with scheduling conflicts. It’s very all-or-nothing.”

The work, students say, is slightly heavier than standard Core in the fall, partly due to the expanded lab component. But the high faculty-to-student ratio makes the load feel manageable.

“There are more hours per week on paper,” Blendea says, “but the smaller size means profs are more willing to hear, ‘This set took way too long,’ and adjust. It was a lot at the beginning; now it feels about on par with everyone else.”

Effros emphasizes that the goal is coexistence, not replacement.

“I see Integrated Core as something that runs in parallel,” she says. “It’s meant to be a small-cohort experience. It doesn’t scale easily to the size of standard Core classes, and not every student will want to take it. But I love the idea of enriching the menu of possibilities.”

She also hopes that what works in Integrated Core will eventually leak back into the rest of the curriculum.

“Bi 1 already offers sections that bring in other fields; Integrated Core is another way to help students see connections right from the beginning. Over time, I’d love to see multiple integrated tracks organized around different themes.”

A singularly Caltech experiment

Students admire Crowley Lake, gazing at the Sierra Nevada mountains. (Photo: Paul Asimow)

For the faculty involved, the pilot has already been very rewarding.

“From a faculty perspective, it’s fantastic,” Asimow says. “We’ve been having enormous fun—going to each other’s lectures, teaching what we want to teach the way we want to teach it, with an enthusiastic, question-asking classroom full of excitement. It’s the teaching we all wish we could do at some point.”

Jahner, who divides her time between dean responsibilities and medieval literature, sees the project as an act of institutional optimism.

“It’s a very Caltech kind of thing to have a grand, complicated plan and just start on it,” she says. “You bring in the people who are excited, figure out how to make it work, then how to make it work a little better. It’s guided by people’s intellectual curiosity and their desire to share what they care about most.”

Prof. Refael frames it in terms of stewardship.

“Caltech is an attractor for a lot of talent,” he says. “We’re entrusted with that talent as a college, so we’re stewards. If we just teach standard classes in standard ways, that extra Caltech value doesn’t really come out. When we innovate around courses—like Integrated Core—that’s where the character of Caltech professors shows up in our teaching.”

In its first week, Integrated Core shrank from 20 to 17 students as a few opted back into standard Core. The remaining cohort, faculty say, is thriving. The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach will run surveys to gather more surveys to gather more systematic feedback later in the year.

For now, the results are principally anecdotal: clusters of frosh in BBE 1101 late into the night, field-trip photos from geothermal wells and dead forests on Mammoth Mountain, and laughter as first-years contrive absurd Fermi estimates at dinner.

“Everyone at Caltech understands why Core is good,” Blendea says. “Even if you didn’t like it, it’s useful. For the right type of person, Integrated Core just makes that even better.”

Yu agrees.

“It’s clear IC isn’t meant to replace standard Core,” he says. “But I’m glad Caltech is trying it. We’re already seeing lessons they can eventually integrate back into normal Core. And I’m glad I signed up.”