January Term 2025

This seminar integrates the liberal arts with the experience of work and the search for a vocation or career. Course content will include both an off-campus internship and on-campus class sessions that connect academic theories/analyses of work with their particular internship experience. Students will also consider and articulate the value of the liberal arts for their pursuit of a creative, productive, and satisfying professional life. Offered during Interim.

ACE Component: Students complete internships at various sites in non-profit and for-profit healthcare and wellness settings.

TBD

ACE Component: TBD

This course helps students explore the connections between society and their own lives. Students answer challenging questions such as “Do we have a ‘human nature’?,” “Why does social inequality exist?,” “What is race?,” and “How do societies change?” In answering these questions students learn to develop a sociological imagination. In doing so they review the various research methods and theories that form the sociological tradition. This course is open to first-year students or students in certain accredited programs.

ACE Component: TBD

In this course, students examine how schools and communities in the Twin Cities interact to provide support and developmental opportunities for school-age children. Through lectures, readings, discussions, field trips, and in-school and co-curricular placements, students gain an understanding and awareness of how race, class, ethnicity, national origin, and gender shape the complex character of urban youth and schools. Students spend one week in orientation activities on campus and two weeks in the Twin Cities. The last week of January Term is spent back on campus discussing the experience.

ACE Component: During the time in the Twin Cities, St. Olaf students participate as tutors and classroom assistants during the school day and then assist in various after-school and community programs.

This course combines experiential learning with ethical reflection. It offers networking and possible job shadowing opportunities in the areas of policy-making, advocacy, campaigning, federal and local government, journalism, advocacy, law, among others. Students will be matched with a number of St. Olaf alumni and professionals in Washington, D.C. and be able to talk with them about their jobs and perhaps shadow them at their workplace. The jobs-shadowing and career-related experiences will be paired with course material that will help you learn about the practice of governance, politics as a vocation, political efficacy and the ethical dimensions of leadership and public service.

ACE Component: Students will participate in a service activity in the DC metro area with a local organization.

This academic civic engagement course explores the culture of Puerto Rico, including its politics, national identity, folklore, and the environment. Students travel to Puerto Rico (a territory of the U.S.A.), where they read and analyze authentic materials in Spanish and participate in talks and discussions with local professors, college students, and community leaders. Among the topics explored are colonialism, religion, citizenship, tourism, gentrification, natural disasters, race, and sustainability. Offered periodically during January Term. Apply through Smith Center for Global Engagement.

ACE Component: During the January Term program, students will participate in a direct service projects in conjunction with local community partners to experience and analyze first-hand larger systemic issues that face the island, its people, and its environment.