Unexpected career change and what it might mean for reform in higher education.
 
Mercedes Carota NU’10 and Jim Stellar
 
Mercedes Carota is a Business Student at Northeastern.  She should have graduated, but stayed on to complete premedical requirements after a career change in her junior year.  Mercedes was also a member of a team of students that [...]

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The Experience of Co-op as seen several Years after Graduation.
 
Amanda Marsden NU ’08 and Jim Stellar
 
Amanda Marsden is a co-author with Rick Porter and me of the “Engaging the Whole Student” paper, the second post (2/17/09) and one that helped launch this blog.  Amanda and I often talk about experiential education a habit from our [...]

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Co-op vs. Permanent Employment
 
 Natania Crane NU ’08 and Jim Stellar
Natania graduated a year ago with a BA in Psychology and worked in a Behavioral Neuroscience laboratory down the hall from ours at Northeastern University.  We kept in touch after she graduated and moved to an fMRI lab in California, and after I moved to me [...]

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Mentor-Mentee: Self Discovery, Emotional Connections, Learning and Memory.
 
Shiela Kern ’09 and Jim Stellar
 
Shiela and I have known each other for a few years.  We started talking seriously this last year or so about how she could have experiences (working in hospitals or in labs) that would help clarify her career choices.  Out of that [...]

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The Book “Blink” and Experiential Education: Tapping the same Other Lobe of the Brain Circuits?
Once one begins to think about how emotional logic circuits operate in experiential education (other lobe of the brain thinking), one sees them in other domains.  Here is a good example.
-Jim and Shwen
 

 
 
 
Hillary W. Steinbrook and Jim Stellar
 
Hillary is a law [...]

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As you can see, we continue to connect experiential learning notions to learning opportunities that might not to appear at first glance to be experiential, such as the entrepreneurship teaching techniques in Jamie’s classroom about which she and Jim write below.  Of course we believe they may well be connected because they drive the limbic circuits [...]

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Study abroad is in many ways the most academic of experiential programs and therefore has the greatest acceptance in colleges and universities.  What is interesting then is how it is sometimes combined with co-op abroad to really intensify the abroad experience.  This piece below by Jim and a student illustrates that.
-Jim and Shwen
 
Combining Study Abroad [...]

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Here is another post that comes out of Jim’s conversations with Northeastern students.  It is touching on social media, something Shwen writes about in his blog, Med 2.0.
 
-Jim and Shwen
 

 
 
Social Media, Warmth, and “Other Lobe: activity
 
Jim Stellar and Ashley Stempel‘10
 
When we are not talking about how cooperative education experiences in industry have affected the [...]

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As we continue with this blog, we find ourselves drawn to other topics outside experiential education, but ones that seem to utilize the same principles as we have been writing about.  Here is one on leadership that developed between Jim and a colleague at work at Northeastern.
 
-Shwen and Jim
 
 
For several years, I (Jim) have been [...]

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Northeastern University is well known for its experiential education programs, particularly cooperative education. But it has only been recently that experiential education was made a part of the core curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences and therefore a graduation requirement. So, we figured it was worth a blog post to bring you a [...]

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