The Aquinas Program is an 18-credit first year college learning community which provides a more effective way of ensuring support for first-year students in becoming members of the academic community. One of the most successful innovations of the program is an assignment called Occasions, in which a student convinces a certain number of other students to attend a local public event and then to write about the experience. The student then reads the others' reflections and writes a response, which is posted to an electronically-based class discussion. Benefits of this assignment include: (1) students' choice and organization of their own Occasions; (2) written reflections as public documents because they are posted to a web-based discussion; (3) increased writing fluency; (4) increased campus activity involvement; (5) larger poetry reading audiences; (6) student discussion about events and ideas; (7) wider student awareness of intellectual culture; and (8) increased ability to make connections between disparate experiences. (EF)