A Barnard Education at Work

Per its mission statement, “Barnard College aims to provide the highest-quality liberal arts education to promising and high-achieving young women… They graduate prepared to lead lives that are professionally satisfying and successful, personally fulfilling, and enriched by a love of learning.” This course finds its roots in the connection posited here, between undergraduate study and professional life. Students will be asked to revisit a foundational text they have encountered in their major, and use it as a mode of exploration and reflection on an internship. They will consider how the text’s themes and ideas can be reinterpreted and recontextualized in the working world, and think about what practical, moral, political, aesthetic and personal insights it affords. More broadly, students will be prompted to consider the relationship of the liberal arts degree (which purports to prepare students for no particular career) to their chosen career path. This course will further hone the critical thinking and writing skills that are translatable to any profession, and enables a Barnard student to put into practice the complexities they have learned in the classroom, by encouraging them to analyze the professional world from different perspectives, and in the context of other ideas and traditions. The text will be selected from a list provided by the student’s major department, and will be subject to approval from the course instructor. On a weekly basis, in this discussion-based class, the student shares their ideas about their text and how it relates to their internship. They respond to and engage with their classmates. They are required to spend about two hours with their text per week. They are also required to create a presentation, to be shared with the full group. The group is also responsible for providing feedback on the presentation. The presentation ultimately evolves into a final paper that explores the line of inquiry from their text as it is instantiated in their work experience. Students are graded on their discussion (40%), presentation (25%), and final paper (35%).