Learning by doing in D.C. and beyond
By American University
April 21, 2023
It wasn’t long after Ben Mermel arrived at American University that he began noticing the school’s approach to learning was unique.
“AU has an incredible culture of internships,” said the political science and legal studies major from New Jersey. “It’s very much experiential focused. At the end of the day the kids who walk across the stage at graduation are so much better prepared for their professional lives than I think you would be anywhere else.”
Mermel is one of those kids. In 2021, he interned at both the US Marshals Service and the Department of Justice. Last year, he worked in Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s office. His experience is not unique among AU students. Ninety percent of AU undergraduates have at least one internship during their time on campus, which is a major reason why six months after graduation, 90 percent of AU undergraduates are working, in graduate school, or both.
Internships are just one pillar of experiential learning—the process of learning by doing—which is deeply integrated into an AU education at every level. Others include research, service learning, student leadership and global experience.
“It used to be that students went to college to have knowledge transmitted to them,” said Peter Starr, AU’s provost and chief academic officer. “Faculty conveyed knowledge and information, as well as the skills needed to process that information. It’s what we have come to call the sage-on-the-stage model. But in the last 20 to 30 years, we have witnessed a total revolution in the availability of information. Now we have whole libraries on our phones.”
With so much information readily available, Starr says, the value of higher education now lies in learning how to process and apply it in practice.
Glover Gate on the AU campus | Photo credit: Jeff Watts
“This has brought about a major shift in how we as faculty conduct our classes,” he continued. “We engage students in more problem-based learning, guiding them in a process of discovery and application. Experiential learning in all its facets has become a critical aspect of this shift.”
Stacia Tomlinson-Elliotte is a business administration major who works as a senior program leader for Legally Speaking, a complex problems seminar first-year students take as part of the AU Core Curriculum. They use real-world problems or enduring questions to hone critical thinking skills for future work at the university and beyond. Full-time professors teach each of the small, three-credit seminars that offer opportunities to consider a variety of perspectives and practice scholarly methods of inquiry.
American University campus| Photo credit: Jeff Watts
Each seminar’s program leader (a sophomore, junior or senior) partners with the instructor to provide academic and social support and to encourage classroom, community and campus engagement. In that role, Tomlinson-Elliotte took students to a courtroom in Maryland to meet with a judge.
“It’s really set me on a mission,” she said of her time as a program leader. “Rather than just having a degree, I’m really intrigued by the pipeline that is experiential learning and how valuable it is to students at a university. You learn both concrete and soft skills that make us be able to go into a workplace and say, ‘I came out of college not just having taken this course; I came out of it ready to contribute something.’”
With study abroad centers in Brussels, Madrid, Nairobi and more than 100 programs worldwide, AU ranks seventh for study abroad in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, with 60 percent of students participating in the experience. Virginia native Johneé Wilson spent the spring 2022 semester studying in Brazil. She became interested in the country’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and while in-country conducted research on female sexual empowerment through the language and music of the diaspora.
“As an international development student, I think American University makes it so accessible for students to study abroad,” she said. “Studying abroad was another reason I chose AU. That experiential type of learning is so meaningful for me. As a kinesthetic learner I like to be hands on, and I like to try things and do the action in order to retain the information. I would not have been able to spend a day with an indigenous African-Brazilian community sitting behind a desk.”
Most people do see Alisyn Camerota, who earned her bachelor’s degree from AU in 1988, sitting behind a desk when they watch her anchor CNN Tonight. But she credits her experience as an intern while a broadcast journalism major at AU for helping to catapult her career.
“AU is so good at connecting students with real people in the professional track,” says Camerota, who has given the School of Communication a generous Change Can’t Wait campaign gift to support experiential learning. “I learned things in my internship that I still apply every day. My advice to students is to get involved and get involved early. The globe is our laboratory, and these experiences launch students onto a successful career path.” Camerota’s gift will support everything from internships to courses that deliver professional networking and portfolio-building opportunities to study abroad.
The nation’s capital has long been a magnet for students seeking real-world experience. In addition to the federal government, the city is a center for high-end engineering and science work, health care and nongovernmental organizations. AU’s student-centered focus differentiates it from other universities in the area when it comes to offering experiential learning opportunities, Starr said.
“I think we do a good job of thinking across silos and disciplinary divisions in creating opportunities for our students,” he said. “Students are more central to the way that we think of our university than many of our competitors. I think the faculty-student bond at AU is very strong, and faculty mentorship of our students is particularly strong.”
Mermel appreciated that blending of traditional and experiential learning early in his collegiate career and later, when he worked in Office of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice.
“So much of what you learn in a classroom is theoretical,” he said. “It is totally different to do it in a professional capacity. Theory is one thing and action is another. I found that a lot of the classes I’ve taken on political science and law had given me a great theory background, but there is nothing like being in the press room at the DOJ and hearing, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the attorney general of the United States.’”
Those are the types of learning experiences that he—and countless other American University students—never will forget.
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