Exploratory Essay

The world operates on a global scale, as a matter of fact, students interact in an interdisciplinary fashion already in their lives.They actively organize complex social networks and they interact across cultures in the virtual world sharing publicly their opinions comfortably. Therefore, teaching methodologies have to adjust to students new modes of addressing the world. The U.S. educational system has an obligation to prepare students with new global competencies to efficiently respond to the world around them in order to carry out the task and responsibilities of their own generation. The marketplace is looking for graduates who, in addition to grades and specialization, effectively communicate, think out of the box and know how to work

Simultaneously, employers require knowledge and in-depth skills in a specific field or major. On the other hand, students are demanding a different approach to education, they feel something is missing in their learning experience. Pew’s statistics state that students when asked to how do they prepare themselves for the labor force, half of all college graduates say gaining more work experience while they were undergraduates would have helped their chances to get the job they wanted. Men (55%) are more likely than women (45%) to say this. Out of them, about two-thirds of all Millennials (65%) say they should have gotten more work experience while in college (Pew Research Center,

This current of thought is already being successfully implemented, for instance, the University of Iowa has a compelling new initiative, Iowa Grow, which “uses brief, structured conversations between student employees and their supervisors to help students connect the skills and knowledge they are gaining in the classroom with their student work, and vice versa” (Iowa Grow, n.d.). Another example is the Catholic University of Portland, the school offers an interdisciplinary core curriculum that is founded on the idea that a single discipline by itself is not enough to effectively respond to complex situations in the world today, therefore, the inquiry must intersect with the different disciplines. Furthermore, the school offers an Integrated Work Learning option, a supervised internship that connects classroom theories and knowledge, to practical, real-world professional settings. These are very diverse internships that “can be completed throughout the academic year, in the summer, and [the student] can receive credit and/or pay, and be completed locally, nationally and internationally” (University of Portland n.d). With this kind of education, students experiment locally and with their communities a system of education