Northeastern University: Experiential Education

If you hadn't been to Boston in twenty years, you would be stunned to know that I spent a morning at Northeastern. Twenty years ago, Northeastern was almost entirely a commuter school: it was well-respected as a place to get a part-time nursing or engineering degree, and accordingly the campus was easily accessible by public transit and had plentiful parking. It was a great place to get a degree, but it wasn't a place you'd necessarily think of as a place to spend four years as an undergraduate.


Fast-forward twenty years and you'll find Northeastern University a changed place. Those parking lots have been covered with brand-new dormitories and state-of-the-art science labs and workout facilities. A school that used to be known for its stellar programs for commuters is now known for its cutting edge co-op program, through which nearly all students graduate in four years with about eighteen months of work experience in their field. Northeastern combines the best attributes of a career-centric college with the strengths of a four-year undergraduate experience.

Northeastern has a lot to offer. The admissions representative who gave our info session made a few too many mentions of "all the other Boston schools" with a few too many references to BU--perhaps a relic of a time when it took a lot more effort to convince people that Northeastern is a legitimate place to go to school. My tour guide took the same approach; I learned almost as much about BU from his tour as I did about Northeastern. Both schools have a lot in common: they're both accessible by four or five T stops (compare that to the one stop each that serve Harvard and MIT), they're both integrated into the heart of Boston's streets, and they both take great advantage of the employment and volunteer opportunities that Boston has to offer. The admissions rep also proudly reported that Northeastern has the largest number of volumes of any library in Boston--at which point everyone in the room started to contradict her and then simultaneous remembered that Harvard and MIT are across the river in Cambridge.

The cornerstone of the Northeastern experience is its signature "experiential learning" program, a required component of the undergraduate degree. The experiential learning component can be fulfilled through any one of four areas: cooperative education, student research, service learning, and global experience (AKA study abroad). Most students choose the cooperative education--or "co-op"--option, which involves spending entire semesters and summers working in industry. The co-op opportunities are remarkable: Northeastern has a long-standing partnership with NASA in addition to tons of connections to publishing, the financial industry, marketing firms, and non-profits here and abroad. Since experiential learning is a core requirement here, there are unlimited possibilities for how you can fulfill this requirement. I was really impressed by the anecdote my tour guide told me about a fellow student working on her second six-month co-op experience. She is a current junior working a six-month stint with a major marketing firm in Boston, and because of the on-the-job experience and classroom-based education she's received at Northeastern, she is a managerial position. As a college junior, two of the people who report directly to her are '08 graduates of Boston University. This program is really remarkable, and I highly encourage you to visit the experiential learning website here: http://www.northeastern.edu/experiential/


Northeastern is all about coupling meaningful on-the-job experiences with powerful classroom-based learning. Ultimately, I love Northeastern for its strong programs, its connections to the working world, and its role as a gateway to Boston and the world. If you want to get as close to the working world as quickly as possible, Northeastern can be a great place to start making that connection.