Skills. Reflection. Transition.
The Bridge Courses were launched in Spring 2017 as a series of 1-credit, pass/fail seminars to help seniors gain personal and professional skills, reflect on their undergraduate experiences, and prepare for leading a meaningful and fulfilling life after graduation. We designed the Bridge Courses for seniors who are seeking opportunities to prepare for the transition from college to the world beyond the front gates in a way that makes the most of their Georgetown education.

**Registration does not open until 3 PM on Monday November 13**
Spring 2024 Bridge Courses (UNXD 3350-4412 in MyAccess)
UNXD 3350 (W 12:30-2:30)
Negotiation affects all of our lives. We constantly strive in so many daily situations to secure agreements or cooperation or coordinated conduct with others that benefit our own interests. This course introduces students to the structural theories and the practical applications of negotiation, and, with realistic simulations, explores the behavior of individuals and organizations in competing situations.
Through a series of negotiation exercises, lectures, and class discussions, students will come to understand negotiation theory and practice negotiation skills that will be useful for a lifetime. Simulation exercises employ hypothetical situations in which students buy/sell a used car, agree on the various terms of a new job, negotiate the terms of a new business venture, and buy/sell a house, among others. Simulations give students an opportunity to develop and try their negotiating skills in a safe environment with continuing feedback from the professor and their classmates.
Feedback and self-reflection are critical to the success of experiential learning. Student journals, recording their analysis and impressions of each negotiating simulation, are recommended but not required.
Instructor: Andrew Caffey
UNXD 3357 (M 6:30-8:30pm)
“You can run, but you can’t hide.” What boxer Joe Louis is reported to have said about his ring opponents could also be said about you and ethical challenges. You can run from them, but you can’t hide from them. They will confront you in your personal life and in your professional life. Indeed, in all likelihood, they already have.
Leadership or ethics? Leadership and ethics? Some people think you have to choose between the two. The premise of this course is that leadership and ethics are two sides of the same coin. The ideal is ethical leadership. It’s not only ideal, but it’s possible (though not always easy) to practice both. That is what this course is all about.
This course will help prepare you to deal more successfully with some of the kinds of ethical challenges you might face in your career. It will do so by using case studies of people, leaders at various levels, some real and some fictional, in different kinds of settings, who have been confronted with ethical challenges, and by introducing you to various concepts and frameworks for moral reasoning and ethical decision-making. Applying the concepts and frameworks to the case studies should help you build your own tool kit for moral reasoning and ethical decision-making — helping you become an ethical leader. We will be analyzing various actors in the case studies, but in the end, this course is not about them, it’s about you.
Instructor: Al Pierce
UNXD 3362 (Online, Thur 12:30-2:30)
How can students apply creativity to their lives that they gained, before and during their time at Georgetown, and beyond the Hilltop? This course will offer seniors organizational plans for maintenance, growth, for using creative gift(s) for creative expression and creative problem solving. The fulfillment of a creative need will be investigated for personal growth, and innovative thinking through a variety of creative means, and professional branding for the future of the student. Maintenance, nourishment, and currency to fulfilling a creative need will be investigated as well. This course is not lecture-based, rather it is highly experiential; students will engage in creative exercises each week that draw on the readings and their personal experiences. No previous knowledge or coursework of art, drawing, or art history is required.
Instructor: Tom Xenakis
UNXD 3364 (W 10-11:50am)
Environmental degradation. Gender inequality. Toxic political division. The list of challenges facing society can often seem endless, overwhelming and without solutions. What can one person do to make an impact on the world?
Dr. Jane Goodall, the international environmental icon who is literally the woman who redefined our notion of man through her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees, thinks deeply about these questions. She responds with a simple, yet provocative philosophy that has become the signature of her work: the need to have reasons for hope and then to act upon them.
Dr. Goodall has five reasons: the determination of young people, the resilience of nature, the human brain, the indomitable human spirit and the power of social media (her latest). As she reminds us, “the greatest danger to our planet is that we lose hope. Because, if we have no hope, we give up and stop trying to do our bit to make a difference.”
Using her book, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, as a guide, students will explore Dr. Goodall’s framework and be challenged to interact with tangible examples in their everyday lives that illuminate each reason. They will then reflect deeply on their own values to create their personal reasons for hope, along with a plan for how to activate them as they proceed to the next stage of their life’s journey.
Along the way, students will also meet change makers leading with a hope mindset while they apply lessons from Dr. Goodall’s remarkable life story, the instructor’s personal experience working for her, and even the famous chimpanzees themselves.
Instructor: John Trybus
This class has 4 sections: 2 pairs across Main Campus and Doha
Seniors:
3365-01 GU MAIN students (TH 10 – 10:50AM)
+
3365-70 GU-Q students (TH 5-5:50PM)
Sophs and Jrs:
3365-02 GU MAIN Students (TH 11-11:50AM)
+
3365-71 GU-Q Students (TH 6-6:50PM)
This course focuses on how Georgetown students develop a sense of well-being, belonging and purpose within the various communities they live. This course takes a social and developmental psychology perspective, encouraging students to reflect, explore, and discuss how key aspects of their identity have evolved during their time at Georgetown (and beyond). The learning environment will be enhanced through a cross-cultural component where students from the main campus and GU-Qatar campus will interact in real time. The course will create opportunities for exploring and expressing one’s authentic self through in-class interactions with peers and various out of class experiences (online and volunteering). Students will attend to the relationship between their individual well-being and sense of purpose and that of the multiple communities they live and represent (Georgetown, Qatar/DC, groups that reflect various identities). In doing so, students will address the following existential question: to what degree should I expect to nurture myself or my communities and vice versa. Topics that influence the interaction between personal development and community affiliations – power dynamics, identity statuses, core values and belief systems, and social-navigational strategies – will be investigated. In doing so, students will strive to understand their optimal balance between personal fulfillment and responsibility to the communities within they exist.
Instructor: John Wright, Director of Student Life, GUQ
UNXD 3366 (W 2-4)
This course provides an introduction to mindfulness meditation especially through the lens of the mind-body connection. The course includes practicing various mindfulness techniques.
Instructor: Anthony Pirrotti
UNXD 4404 (T 1-3:30)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously wrote that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Yet today it is almost impossible for members of free society to go inside of prison walls, much less to interact with incarcerated people as human beings.
This 1-credit UNXD course will prepare a select group of Georgetown seniors for life after graduation by exposing them to this forgotten and ignored element of our humanity. It is an extraordinary experience that they will cherish and that will inspire them for the rest of their lives. The course will include several meetings at the DC Jail with incarcerated students.
Instructor: Marc Howard
UNXD 4405 (T 4-6)
This course examines our increasingly interconnected – yet stubbornly fragmented and unequal – world, and asks how we might conscientiously choose to live and act in it. Drawing on the fields of comparative political and economic development, we will explore the cross-national patterns of behavior by states and private actors that are shaping outcomes in education, growth, social inclusion, and political participation. We will complement this empirical study with normative perspectives drawn from the fields of philosophy, social and cultural analysis, and theology, ultimately pushing each of ourselves to decide on concrete ways our convictions can shape our choices about how to live as aware and responsible citizens in the world as it exists today.
Instructor: Fr. Matt Carnes SJ
UNXD 4406 (Section 01: M 11-12:50) (Section 02: T 12:30-2:30)
What do you really want in life? You probably want a great job with a great salary, great relationships, great health, and all in a great neighborhood. You want to be happy, like everyone else who has ever set foot upon the earth. But how can we thrive in such a difficult world where people cause so much injustice, violence, and environmental degradation? Is it even possible to thrive as a professional, a citizen, a basic human being in a social pressure cooker where people burn out regularly? How is it that well-being in the United States has steadily declined even though income per capita has doubled over the last 50 years? (World Happiness Report 2018, United Nations).
It is possible to thrive. However, according to Gallup research, only 11% of the 30,000 college-educated adults surveyed report they are thriving. By the same token, 17% of that population admit to not thriving at all. (Gallup-Purdue Index Report 2014, “Great Jobs, Great Lives”)
Within the last ten years researchers have discovered game changing information about how the body and mind function. With this knowledge we can intentionally create the conditions to thrive. With this information, we have no excuse not to.
This bridge course aims to provide students with up-to-date research on human flourishing so that they might effectively manage their own lives in order to flourish after graduation and beyond. Students learn they have agency in directing the trajectory of their lives through self care, discernment, and positive relationships.
Instructor: Sarah Stiles
UNXD 4410 (W 6 – 7:20pm)
This seminar will provide students the opportunity to explore the core beliefs that guide their daily lives, and how their backgrounds and life experiences influenced and shaped the beliefs they hold today. Utilizing Jesuit values as our foundation, this course will examine students’ formation process throughout their Georgetown career within the context of their daily lives. Students will be challenged to contemplate “Where They Are From,” connecting this journey to the larger construct of power and privilege. The course will conclude with students (re)developing “This I Believe,” in order to articulate to themselves and other persons the core of who they and who they aspire to be.
Instructors: Joan Riley and Christopher Barth
UNXD 4412 (Section 01: T 4:30-6pm) (Section 02: 6:30-8pm)
This course will consist of 6 guided discussions, and a student led one, on questions that will most probably arise as Georgetown Seniors transition from their student life to a working life and beyond. We will reflect on your education at Georgetown and chart a possible courses to apply it for the rest of your life. The problems we discuss have no permanent solutions; people have been wrestling with them from time immemorial. Life challenges you to create answers to new situations, mostly new to you, until it ends. We will explore the idea of a life of learning, based on your Georgetown education, as a path to your most successful and rewarding life.
Instructors: Keith Hrebenak
Archive of Courses
Past Bridge courses explored skillsets and mindsets not normally found in the traditional curriculum, in low-pressure and relaxed settings. The courses are offered under the Just Communities course categories (Ways Of...) and Purposeful Careers. The Just Communities courses bring added attention to the relationship between one's own individual well-being and purpose and that of the multiple communities in which one lives and serves. The Purposeful Careers courses support you in developing the senses of discernment and purpose as you embark on career paths of meaning and service.
WAYS OF BEING
John Trybus, Center for Social Impact Communication
Environmental degradation. Gender inequality. Toxic political division. The list of challenges facing society can often seem endless, overwhelming and without solutions. What can one person do to make an impact on the world?
Learn more here.
John Wright, CAPS, CMEA
How do our identities impact how we relate to others? How do variables such as race, class, religion, and gender affect our interpersonal relationships not only at Georgetown? How might a better understanding of these identities allow for intra- and interpersonal growth in this time of transition from college to beyond.
Learn more here.
Frank Ambrosio, Philosophy
What does it mean to be responsible for oneself and to others in 2020 and beyond? How should we understand the dynamics of accelerated change at work in the world and a heightened level of stress, anxiety and conflict they produce?
Learn more here.
Sarah Stiles, Sociology
To what degree do we have agency in our lives? Is it possible to direct our lives to thrive in our post graduate lives? Within the last ten years researchers have discovered game changing information about how the body and mind function. With this knowledge we can steer ourselves to flourishing.
This bridge course aims to provide students with up to date research on human flourishing that they might effectively manage their own lives so as to thrive in their postgraduate lives. Students learn they have agency in directing the trajectory of their lives through self care, discernment, and relationships.
Learn more here.
WAYS OF DOING
Andrew Caffey, GU Law
Through a series of negotiation exercises, lectures, videos and class discussions, students will come to understand negotiation theory and practice negotiation skills that will be useful for a lifetime. Simulation exercises employ hypothetical situations in which students agree on the various terms of a new job, negotiate the terms of an apartment lease, and buy/sell a house, among others. Simulations give students an opportunity to develop and try their negotiating skills in a safe environment with continuing feedback from the professor and their classmates.
Learn more here.
Al Pierce, SFS
This is a course in applied ethics or practical ethics, one that does not fall into one of the traditional academic disciplines, but rather should appeal to students with various academic majors. It will help prepare you to deal more successfully with some of the kinds of ethical challenges you might face in your career. It will do so by using case studies of real people who have been confronted with ethical challenges, and by introducing you to various concepts and frameworks for moral reasoning and ethical decision-making.
Learn more here.
Thomas Xenakis, Art & Art History
How can we think and innovate creatively in professional spaces? How can creativity be an asset in our personal and professional lives beyond college? This course will offer seniors organizational plans for maintenance, for growth, for using creative gift(s) for creative expression and for creative problem solving.
Learn more here.
WAYS OF KNOWING
Fr. Matt Carnes SJ, Government, Center for Latin American Studies
This course examines our increasingly interconnected – yet stubbornly fragmented and unequal – world, and asks how we, as global citizens, might conscientiously choose to live and act in it. Drawing on the fields of comparative political and economic development, we will explore the cross-national patterns of behavior by states and private actors that are shaping outcomes in education, growth, social inclusion, and political participation. Learn more here.
Joan Riley, NHS, Fr. Jerry Hayes SJ, Mission and Ministry, Christopher Barth, Jesuit Community
Utilizing Jesuit values as our foundation, this course will examine students’ identity formation process throughout their Georgetown career within the context of their daily lives. This seminar will provide students the opportunity to explore the core beliefs that guide their daily lives, and how their backgrounds and life experiences influenced and shaped the beliefs they hold today. Learn more here.
James Olsen, CNDLS, Philosophy
Headlines are dominated not simply with bad news, but potentially catastrophic news. It is not mere hyperbole to note that you will spend your adult lives confronting global challenges and tragedies whose scale goes well beyond that of former ages—from environmental degradation to inequality and poverty to mass migration to technological revolutions and labor disruptions. This creates a uniquely poignant existential burden. The key question this course will examine is: Given this context, how do we utilize our reason and other capacities to pursue both the good and the good life? How do we live well in a dark time? Learn more here.
Keith Hrebenak, SFS
This course will consist of 7 sessions on questions that will most probably arise as Georgetown Seniors transition from their student life to a working life and beyond. We will reflect on your education at Georgetown and chart a possible courses to apply it for the rest of your life. The problems we discuss have no permanent solutions; people have been wrestling with them from time immemorial. Life challenges you to create answers to new situations, mostly new to you, until it ends. We will explore the idea of a life of learning, based on your Georgetown education, as a path to your most successful and rewarding life. Learn more here.
PURPOSEFUL CAREERS
Orozco
Through a critical examination of constructs such as Chaos Theory of Careers (Pryor & Bright) and Self-Authorship (Baxter Magolda), students will explore frameworks to guide their reflection process. Readings, written assignments, group discussion among students, and conversations with participating alumni will facilitate the development of stories related to beliefs about life and work, values, strengths, and relationships with others. Students will create and present a living project that can be refined in the years to come.
Learn more here.
Previous Semesters
UNXD 353: Vocation and Purpose
UNXD 367: Spirituality and Leadership
UNXD 406: Flourishing in the Future
UNXD 409: The Problem of No God
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