Happy (Belated) New Year!

September has always meant new pencils and new notebooks and new rulers. Later, it meant a slide ruler hung from my belt like a sword, then a calculator, and then computers. New shoes, new clothes, and a new grade. I have nearly lived my entire life by an academic calendar, and September was always the start of a new year, of a new beginning, and the making of new friends.

Since 1996, I have been teaching history at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts as a visiting instructor to now an associate professor. Wheaton is a wonderfully friendly small liberal arts college that punches well above its weight class. It has been an honor to work at the institution that made my career, that contributed to my education as an educator, and that introduced me to so many terrific young people. I discovered my purpose at Wheaton, and for that I will always be grateful.

This semester, though, I did not make the drive down to Wheaton, instead, I took the train to Boston’s Non-Profit Center, the building that houses the College for Social Innovation. For the previous four years, I have coordinated the Semester in the City (SITC) program for Wheaton College. Each year, I became more convinced of the importance of this program for this time and current generation of students. These last few years of political unrest, pandemics, and growing inequity have made it clear just how important it is to educate and train this generation in the importance of empathy and optimism in the workplace and in life, to teach them to embrace and learn from failure instead of fearing it, and encourage a generation of changemakers who adjust and thrive in ambiguity. Semester in the City does all of that and so much more. Businesses have complained for years that younger workers are not prepared in college for work after they graduate. The pieces are all there: studying with a diverse student body, conducting and writing research, facing failure, opportunities to increase empathy and understanding, remain hopeful of the future they are facing, and to make sense of ambiguity. But the dots are not being connected in a way meaningful to many, if not most, employers. Semester in the City connects those dots through intense experiential learning, like an apprenticeship program for work and life. Many colleges are slowly moving to adding experiential learning requirements for their students, and any experience is better than none at all. But it has become clear to me in these last few months that SITC is the Cadillac of experiential learning programs. Living in apartments in Boston, learning how to navigate the city and its transit system, working a 30 hour per week internship with incredible mentors from our wonderful host sites, learning how to live on a budget, “adulting,” and so much more results in young people who find a purpose in their lives that cannot be taught in a college classroom. One alum of the program who is still a student, mentioned to me recently that she now understands her classes better. Before the program, she could not connect the dots in her many classes, though she did well academically. After she returned to the classroom it was as though she had received a Rosetta stone for understanding her professors and her assignments, and that deeper understanding has contributed to her liking her classes even more. For other students who are coming of age in the era of helicopter parenting, having to rely on themselves has been scary at first, but so worth those beginning jitters. They can now lean in, instead of leaning on their parents for every decision.

The program is a boon to colleges as well. They do not have to hire more personnel, seek available housing in the city, find and train mentors for their important task, etc. For relatively little money, our partner colleges can offer the benefit of the program to their students and receive back purpose driven students ready to more fully engage in their courses and campus life. Of course, there are many students who cannot leave their homes and campuses because of their many family responsibilities or for other reasons, and our new program, Semester for Impact, will make it much easier for those students with outsized responsibilities to benefit from our inspired experiential learning programs.

We are about to begin week four of our fifteen week program, and the confidence of our SITC Fellows is palatable. They still have so much more to experience, and yet, their growth is already evident. It is amazing and heartwarming to witness them change so quickly. And I have changed as well, and made new friends, and even bought some new clothes! Happy New Year, everyone!