The Common Reading Program is an essential piece of your First Year Experience at Wright State University. It was developed:
- To expose you to our academic atmosphere from the time you arrive on campus for Orientation
- To provide a common academic experience for all first-year students by giving you the opportunity to engage with your peers in intellectual discussions both inside and outside the classroom.
- To communicate the expectation that you will begin to read actively and critically, make judgments about the validity of what you read and be able to discuss challenging, sometimes conflicting, ideas.
You will also be provided with a series of interconnected academic and beyond-the-classroom activities that will challenge your critical thinking and evaluation of the text through your Learning Community and in many of your General Education courses.
We ask you to become an active member of the Raider community from the start by participating in this shared reading experience, discussing a controversial book, considering the issues it raises, formulating your own views, and sharing them with your teachers and classmates.
Common Text 2013
The Other Wes Moore
One Name, Two Fates
By Wes Moore
Two kids with the same name, living in the same city. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison for felony murder. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.
Students will receive a copy of the Common Text at Orientation
Common Text 2012
Girl in Translation 
by Jean Kwok
Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, Girl in Translation is an inspiring debut about a young immigrant in America, a smart girl who, living a double life between school and sweatshop, understands that her family’s future is in her hands. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she straddles.
Previous Common Texts
Previous Common Texts used by Wright State University
- Nickel and Dimed '03–'04
- Let Your Life Speak '04–'05
- Eagle's Shadow '05–'07
- Inconvenient Truth '07-'08
- Freakonomics '08-'09
- Three Cups of Tea '09-'10
- A Long Way Gone '10-'11
- Zeitoun '11-'12
