Ensuring that immersive learning becomes embedded in every student’s experience at SAIS… Providing more networking and community-building opportunities — the cornerstone of career development.

As part of the new curricular changes at SAIS, the School is creating an office devoted entirely to co-curricular and experiential learning. Every SAIS graduate remembers the study trip, staff ride, or skills course that provided that extra boost that helped them land that first job out of SAIS. Immersive learning is a powerful tool, and SAIS is committed to building these experiences into every student’s time here.

The new Office of Co-Curricular and Experiential Learning (CCEL) will expand these opportunities and ensure that students all have equal access to them. The CCEL office is now part of the new central infrastructure at SAIS and will design, implement, and evaluate school-wide opportunities and activities, in close collaboration with the Global Careers and Student Affairs offices. The goal is to offer co-curricular and experiential learning activities to all students across all academic fields, also helping promote greater diversity of interests and experience within activities.

The CCEL office will also help further integrate these experiences into the MA curriculum, linking them to learning goals related to skills (e.g. leadership, professional development, analytical and critical thinking) that SAIS students and the job market demand. This will allow SAIS to package our experiential learning courses and activities in a more coherent way and provide additional networking and community-building opportunities for SAIS students — the cornerstone of good career development.

As part of this effort, the CCEL office is building a library of experiential learning opportunities tailored to providing SAIS students experiences that will allow them to apply what they learn in the classroom to real-life situations. We will be chronicling and detailing the experiences we already offer and seeking to add additional activities. As an example, two of the most popular experiences currently offered are:

Practicums: SAIS offers a variety of practicum classes that give students an extensive, in-depth, real world experience. Students work in teams with external client organizations on projects addressing international policy challenges. The practicum provides quality research and analysis to clients, while students develop their consulting skills and apply concepts learned in the classroom to critical problems.

Study Trips: Each year, the School supports faculty-led international trips to study a specific issue or complex set of problems facing a country. Students are tasked with researching different aspects of the issue, detailing the historical context and the current situation on the ground, and identifying and setting up interviews with key policymakers and officials to meet during the trip. After the trip, each student contributes to a policy report and helps present the report to a public audience.

As SAIS moves forward with its new curriculum, the CCEL office will expand its offerings of experiential learning opportunities and skills courses to reinforce and deepen each student’s classroom time at SAIS.

—Margel Highet