This is the site of the Concourse 18.02 course (a.k.a. CC.1802) that ran for 9 years from Fall 2011 through Fall 2019. I imagine that some version of the course will continue within the remnants of the Concourse Program, a program that billed itself as “integrating science and the humanities” but which made no effort to actually do so for at least the last 8 years. Concourse has sold that false bill of goods simply to justify its continued existence as an MIT Freshman Learning Community.

The students of Concourse are much the same as virtually all MIT students - curious, smart, and a pleasure to know. The Concourse Program, in contrast, is built on a foundation of hypocrisy. Themes like justice and truth and knowledge are presented to its students, but what has come to define Concourse are the need for control and enforcing obedience and taking care of the selfish needs of the administrators of the program. Those of us who were simply very good at teaching our courses (and greatly appreciated by our students) and who did our best to actually integrate science and the humanities or, in my case, civic responsibility, have never been valued by the directors of the program. Those who teach in Concourse actually have very little say in how the program operates, and the program has largely been on auto-pilot for some time. That said, you could probably randomly pick 50 MIT freshmen and make it work as long as good teachers were in the program who actively engaged students.

I treasure all of my relationships with students built up over 9 years working in Concourse as well as the absolute joy of sharing an office for most of my time there with a truly wonderful teacher of Chemistry and mentor of students. I miss the students more than I can put into words. However, I don’t at all miss working an an oppressive environment with an incompetent and vengeful Assistant Director and a Director who values only blind obedience and who would gladly throw under the bus anyone whose independence in any way threatened her personal insecurities. Any academic program, including any MIT Freshman Learning Community, should aspire to greater things. - Robert Winters

• Vectors and vector algebra in R² and R³; dot product, cross product, projection, equations of lines and planes. Matrix methods. (Chap. 12)
• Parameterized curves and surfaces in R² and R³; velocity and acceleration vectors; tangent vectors; arclength. (Chap. 12)
• Functions of several variables - limits, continuity, and differentiabilty; partial derivatives, gradients, linear approximation, directional derivatives, Chain Rule. (Chap. 13)
• Optimization - unconstrained and constrained. (Chap. 13)
• Integration over regions in R² and R³ and their applications, using Cartesian, polar, cylindrical, and spherical coordinates. (Chap. 14)
• Vector fields and their applications. (Chap. 15)
• Integration over curves in R² and R³ by parameterization; work integrals, and applications. (Chap. 15)
• Integration over surfaces in R³ by parameterization - flux integrals, surface area, and applications. (Chaps. 14,15)
• Calculus of vector fields; curl and divergence of vector fields; Green’s Theorem, Stokes’ Theorem, and the Divergence Theorem. (Chap. 15)