The Civic Engagement Certificate is very different from other courses you may have taken. This suite of courses is designed to give you experience working on a real civic engagement project — that means there are no tests, no essays or problem sets but it also means that there are no single, clear correct answers to the challenges you will face, no simple recipes for solving them.

A few important things to remember:

• You will do a good deal of “talking to strangers” including canvassing people on the street, conducting one-on-ones to invite people to volunteer, and introduce yourself to community members at city meetings.

• You will also work on “community time” --community members are not going to come to us, on campus, during class time, we must go to them. This means attending community meetings in the evening or weekends and organizing community events off campus. You will need to plan enough time in your schedule and prioritize these events over other extracurriculars.

• You will also work together with your classmates and community members in an organization working on a single campaign. Organizing requires working in an organization which means that you may have less choice about some of your assignments than you might have in a course where you can choose your readings or essay topics. In return, you will be able to have a far greater social impact than you would working alone and build leadership and professional skills that again will be helpful for any career. We will provide an organizational structure tailored to student abilities, and this will be very different from the individual assignments you have in a typical course.