Experiential Learning Programs
Go beyond theory with experiential learning opportunities that test your knowledge in real-world settings. Immerse yourself in projects that draw upon your prior work experience and build the kind of skills employers are looking for.
Health Care Professions
Doctor of Pharmacy
In ourDoctor of Pharmacy program, you will apply real-world learning in every year of the program. In the first three years, you will interact one day a week with patients, caregivers and other health professionals in your Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experiences. Service learning projects are incorporated into your courses, giving you first-hand views of the environments and issues that your future patients will face. The fourth year of the curriculum is entirely experiential, with seven, six-week experiences in pharmacies, hospitals, clinics and other settings.
Counseling and Family Therapy
Our master’s degree programs in Counseling and Marriage and Family Therapy each give you the opportunity to engage in experiential learning, beginning in your first class. You will participate in 10 hours of service learning during our Cultural Issues and Social Justice class, where you will have the opportunity to engage in community events or community agencies with clients and service providers. After completing basic courses and advanced skills classes, our students begin their clinical component, where you will provide services to community clients under live supervision from faculty.
Biomedical Sciences
You will engage in experiential learning in all of your Biomedical Sciences courses. Courses are closely coordinated and include cross-course Team-Based Learning, where you will apply course material working together as a team, rather than simply acquiring it. You will also complete a 100-hour academic externship, engaged in a real-world biomedical or clinical research environment in the Denver area, adding valuable experience and providing services to biomedical clinicals and researchers in our community.
Student Story: Changing Gears
See how our M.S. in Biomedical Sciences program is giving students real health care experience through clinical externships in Denver.
Business and Education
Nonprofit Management
The Service Oriented Field Experience (SOFE) is a unique, blended, experiential learning capstone class within the Master of Nonprofit Management program. SOFE blends aspects of social justice and nonprofit leadership, helping you experience the reality of being a nonprofit/nongovernmental organization (NP/GO) leader. This eight-week class gives you an opportunity to travel and learn from your global counterparts, and past students have visited countries such as Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Ireland, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda, as well as various places in the U.S.
Health Services Administration
Our graduate Health Services Administration program features an experiential, applied capstone project. Projects differ each year, but you will typically be asked to complete a feasibility study for a nonprofit health care organization in Colorado. You will help evaluate new business endeavors, including components like the market, information technology, human resources, financials, their mission and more. Our partner organizations have often implemented ideas into their businesses upon completion of the project.
Graduate Education Licensure
Our Graduate Licensure Education programs offer experiential learning activities that apply educational theories to real-life experiences. Service learning projects in the community help you gain first-hand knowledge about the services, after-school activities, and support that your students need outside the walls of the classroom. Develop the knowledge you need to work with parents, caretakers and educational professionals on support systems and services your students will rely on daily. These experiential and service-based opportunities provide the skills you will need to become educational leaders.
Science and Craft Brewing
Environmental Biology
Our Environmental Biology program uses cutting-edge techniques (i.e. GIS, use of R) via real-world environmental fieldwork in the Rocky Mountains and in the California desert. You will be asked to engage in the world in a way that will help you achieve personal goals and augment environmental monitoring efforts in your community via a research project with a faculty member or a 100-hour academic externship, which may lead to publication and assisting nonprofit environmental groups.
Applied Craft Brewing
In the Business of Brewing and Brewing Practicum courses within the Applied Craft Brewing program, you will work directly with breweries and community organizations dedicated to craft brewing and will become involved in a growing industry that’s vital to our local community. The culmination of the certificate is a 160-hour internship experience that you will undertake at a local brewery. You will work with local brewers and their employees, applying the knowledge you have gained through your courses.
Regis College Experiential Learning
Regis College's accelerated and online programs for adult learners offer a values-centered education specifically designed for the adult learner. Experiential learning opportunities play a key role in developing skills across diverse disciplines, including communication, criminology, liberal arts, social science and applied psychology. In their experiential capstone, students use internships or service-learning experiences to cultivate new knowledge and reflect on what they have learned.
During an internship, you'll work directly with an employer to enhance your learning and increase your opportunities for employment after graduation. Previous Regis internships have included a 240-hour internship with the Jefferson County Sheriffs’ Department, during which the student investigated cold-case felonies, including cases of homicide, sex crimes and aggravated assault. Other interns have worked in coroner’s offices, and still others have worked with victims’ assistance units, helping victims recover from violent crimes.
This capstone option is ideal for any student who wishes to produce something for their employer. You may wish to develop a new process at work, create a new organizational system, develop a curriculum or write a training manual. The applied project capstone option enables you to draw on your academic knowledge to complete any of these tasks while earning those last few credits for graduation. Recent examples include an Army Chaplain who wrote a new ethical decision-making manual for the Army.
Pursuing a degree in creative writing or literature? It would make sense for the crowning experience of your degree program to be the writing of a novella, a short story collection, a cycle of poems or a play. You'll receive academic credit for creative work that is intimately tied to your academic discipline. Using this option, you can spend two eight-week terms engaging in research on genre, historical context, style and writing technique before creating a literary work you can be professionally proud of.
Service Project
Students who select this capstone option design and execute a project that serves an otherwise underserved community. You might work directly with community members, perhaps acting as a representative for Regis University. Your project will have to be carefully researched and documented, ensuring that the underserved community’s needs really are being met and that the project is carried out in a manner consistent with respect for members of this community.