Session 1

The Business and Leadership Institute (BLI) provides a collaborative environment where participants engage with business and leadership fundamentals through various activities, including self-assessment, case study analysis, video analysis, expert guest speakers, and collaborative small group work. The experiential course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to experience college life at Boston College while expanding their understanding of the business and leadership elements crucial for success in both academic pursuits and early professional endeavors.  

Designed to nurture students' leadership and business acumen, this program offers a broad curriculum spanning various subjects, including personal leadership, marketing, finance, international leadership, team dynamics, emotional intelligence, and the use of AI tools to foster additional research and insights. At the heart of the program is the application of these concepts through the creation of a group business plan for a product or service. Using design thinking principles, students will leverage each day’s learning as they storyboard their “big idea,” culminating in their presentation of their start-up concept to a panel on the final day of the program. This immersive approach ensures that participants grasp theoretical concepts and develop hands-on expertise while incorporating innovative tools for problem-solving and discovery.

Faculty:  Barbara Mitchell

Looking through the lens of history, students will explore Climate Change, Progress, and the Global Citizen from three distinct components. One, students will trace the major events of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have led to where modern society is today in terms of its relationship with nature. Such topics will include a study of the origins of Colonization and Imperialism, the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the rise of Nationalism and the complexities created by competing national interests. The second component of the class will center on the unique relationship between emerging modern societies and nature. Special emphasis will be given to artistic, economic, philosophical, and sociological observations and commentary that accompanied the evolution of modern progress and its impact on the natural world. Last, Climate Change, Progress, and the Global Citizen will offer students the opportunity to explore current social and philosophical commentary on our current global relationship with nature. This last layer of the course will allow students the opportunity to create their own vision for what a more refined, more just perspective might be as we head further into the twenty-first century.

Faculty: Chris Brooks

In Person/On Campus  - Course is Full

Students will learn about the exciting world of forensic science, including basic techniques and concepts. Working with simulated crime scenes, students will look at actual case examples and gain experience in photographing and sketching simulated crime scenes and matching fingerprints, hair fibers, tire tracks, glass, blood splatter, ballistics, and weapons.  Lessons learned in profiling at the FBI Academy will be applied to cases in Douglas's Mindhunter and Burgess & Constantine's A Killer By Design.

Faculty: Ann Wolbert Burgess

Online/Asynchronous

Generation Z (born between 1997–2012) has been described as "an unhappy generation who posts happy pictures online." They have grown up alongside two mind-altering forces in society that helped shape this puzzling experience: the Internet and psychiatry. This course explores the connections between social media and psychiatry as they have influenced the mental health of today's youth, while providing a scientific foundation in psychiatric pharmacology for future students of psychology, sociology, or medicine.

We learn about the fundamentals of psychopharmacology (i.e., the study of the effect of psychiatric drugs on the organism and its behavior) while exploring the sociological, psychological, and philosophical implications of the role of psychiatry among the first post-Internet generation.

In Person/On Campus

An introductory course in which students will learn strategies for writing college level prose and read published examples from several fields. The course will have an emphasis on steady production and revision of texts. Through exercises and/or open and directed writing assignments, students will produce two finished short essays. By the end of this course, students will have developed an understanding of the demands of college level writing, including idea generation, research tools, and the formal expectations of diction, syntax and style; improved their close reading of texts via assigned readings; become more comfortable with writing for college; and produced two short, completed essays. Revisions are the most significant part of the process, and we will spend ample class time thinking about revision and how to make each student’s voice distinctive, so they stand out from the hordes of other student writers.

Faculty: TBA