The First-Year Seminars are taught by Suffolk’s top scholars and teachers who design FYS courses based on their research interests and creative pedagogical impulses. Seminars are small (19 students or fewer) so students get to know their professor and classmates well. As academic mentors, FYS faculty help students navigate the intellectual, social, and cultural life of the college as well as the greater Boston area. Seminars incorporate field trips, guest lectures and workshops, visits to museums, historic places, theatre performances, and various cultural events.

Amy Monticello, First-Year Seminars Program Director

Amy Monticello is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, and the author of two essay collections, Close Quarters (Sweet Publications, 2012) and How to Euthanize a Horse (Arcadia, 2018). She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University, and a BA from Ithaca College. Amy’s teaching and scholarly interests include creative nonfiction, forms of the essay, literary citizenship, first-year writing, and narrative theory. In 2013, she won the S.I. Newhouse School Prize in Nonfiction, and her writing has been listed as notable in Best American Essays. 

Katie Sticca, Administrative Assistant, Writer and Editor

Katie Sticca is the managing editor and fiction editor of Salamander, the literary journal established in 1992 and housed at Suffolk University since 2005. She received her BA in English from the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, and her MFA from Emerson College in Boston, MA. As an assistant to the First-Year Seminars since 2014, she aids the Program Director in administrative matters and provides assistance to faculty and staff in planning program activities.