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View from the Hill
Experiential Education at UNH:
When the World is Your Classroom
If a student wants a broad education but also wants a job waiting after college, which is better: Book learning or experience?
The answer: Both.
The University of New Haven is taking the classroom out of the building, and the students into the field. Understanding full well what the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was thinking when he said, “Skill to do, comes of doing,”
UNH students are availing themselves of internships, research opportunities, and community service that bring them into contact with scientists, businesspeople, professional engineers, authors and more. Experience combined with education—aka experiential education—is moving UNH students into the future equipped to succeed. Experiential education also figures prominently in the University’s Strategic Direction, a master plan for the future.
“Classroom learning combined with internships, research opportunities and many of the other hands-on experiences that UNH offers its students create highly employable graduates,” points out President Steven H. Kaplan.
Craig Schneider '08
Hopes of teaching science led Craig C. Schneider ’08, of Manchester, a graduate student in Environmental Science Ecology, to study erosion of coastal marshes on Long Island Sound.
Schneider is dividing his time between the coast, where he takes samples of living organisms, and the lab, where he studies just how coastal erosion has affected miniscule marine life. "I love the field of environmental science," says Schneider, whose research with Dr. Roman N. Zajac, a UNH professor of Biology and Environmental Science, and other graduate students was featured in a front-page story in the Hartford Courant July 22. "Starting my own project really gives me a sense of how research science works. It allows me to take a hands-on approach, so my head isn’t simply stuck in a book."
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