Make a Difference
Service Learning is an approach to education that pushes you outside the classroom to produce work of real value to a community organization as part of a course.
Service learning can happen, for example, when:
- in a speech course, you research, write, and deliver a speech to raise money for a clean water agency
- in a journalism course, you interview residents at a homeless shelter and write an article about them for publication
- in a pre-health course, you work in a clinic and reflect on that experience
- in a web design course, you design a new website for a tutoring center
Benefits
When you do service learning, you:
- build your professional network because you work directly with people in the field
- get to put cool stuff on your resume. Given the choice between two candidates with the same GPA, degree, and institution, a recruiter will be more interested in the one who has service learning experience.
- get a chance to change the world in a small way
- might learn your course material better because it's more real
- earn course credit
How to Get It
Many courses across the university incorporate service learning. These courses are marked with an "S" (Service) attribute in the course catalog.
Next Steps
- Look for courses with the "S" (Service) attribute in the course catalog
- Ask your professors to add a service learning component to the courses they teach
- Take the Service Learning Collaboratory course
- Talk to program director Michael Sharp