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Hamilton Lugar School of
Global and International Studies
Indiana University Bloomington
Experiential Learning

Experiential Courses

Some Hamilton Lugar courses are built around work you do for someone outside the classroom, and they carry credit like any other course.

What makes a course experiential

Experiential learning courses connect what you learn in the classroom with hands-on, applied experience. You might work on a project with a community partner, conduct research, teach a lesson, create something for a real audience, or take your learning into the field.

What makes a course experiential is the opportunity to put knowledge into practice, and to reflect on that experience as part of your learning. These courses are part of your degree and carry academic credit, just like your other courses.

How to take one of these courses

Global Issues, SGIS-S 300, is one course that runs many different topics. You take it for one to three credits and the topic changes every term — consulting and diplomacy projects, model diplomacy simulations, policy writing, data and visualization tools, languages and area studies, security and technology, and courses on starting a global career. An internship counts as experiential learning too, and it has a course of its own: the internship course, SGIS X373. Check the course listing to see what is open this term.

See this term’s Global Issues topics

Courses and Projects that work this way

Diplomacy Lab

Teams take a research question submitted by the US Department of State and deliver a product a desk officer can actually use. There are two ways in: join a course a faculty member has built around a question, or form a student team and take a question on directly. Hamilton Lugar is the only school at Indiana University that offers the second route.

A student team is two to six people with a faculty supervisor, and it can carry one to three credits through SGIS-S 300 or fold into a course you are already taking. IU Global runs Diplomacy Lab across the whole university, so the questions on offer change every semester. To join a team or to supervise one, contact Katherine Ntiamoah at kntiamoa@iu.edu.

Learn more about IU Diplomacy Lab

Global Development Consulting

Global Development Consulting brings together students from across IU to work in multidisciplinary teams on real-world projects with organizations around the world. Through hands-on consulting experience, students tackle complex global development challenges while building skills in research, communication, project management, teamwork and leadership. With opportunities to take part for multiple years and grow into leadership roles, GDC is a way to turn your interests and academic knowledge into meaningful global impact. Students earn one to three credits for each semester they take part.

Recent projects include analyzing labor rights violations in Eswatini for the US Embassy, analyzing evaluation data for an education organization working across West Africa, creating publicity recommendations for the US Mission to ASEAN, and developing a grant proposal for a refugee organization based in Greece.

Learn more about Global Development Consulting

The semester opens with orientation and training, where you meet the partner and learn about the project. From there the whole group meets for two hours every Friday afternoon, and you spend about five hours a week on your own project work. Each semester ends with a public presentation. The Friday meeting is the one fixed commitment: if you cannot make it, you cannot take part.

The application asks you to submit a cover letter and resume followed by an interview. Watch the website for the application dates and link.

Elisheva Cohen (ellcohen@iu.edu) and Julia Sherry (jcsherry@iu.edu) are the faculty directors, and students run the rest: an executive committee leads the group, a project manager runs each project, and chairs look after recruitment, partnerships, orientation and training, monitoring and evaluation, and communications.

Where to go next