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An expert tailor is hard to find.
Southern Utah University maintains the same can be true when it comes to higher education. The liberal arts school has won this year's top honor from the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE), for altering its arts and humanities courses to highlight their real-world applications.
Students are given credit for experience, which includes internships and co-operative programs, but also projects of their own design.
University President Scott Wyatt led the schoolwide shift to tweak students' expertise toward the preferences of employers such as Deloitte, an international consulting firm.
The program "has taken an enormous amount of work over the last five years," Wyatt said in a statement, "and I'm extremely proud of what our faculty and staff have accomplished."
Examples of student projects include an engineering student's freestanding windmill, a sociology major's journey to Jamaica to study the nation's education system, and an aspiring teacher's week spent launching model rockets in Slovakia as an assistant coach to the junior U.S. Spacemodeling team.
Wyatt's goal is to help better prepare graduates for today's jobs — and ensure that arts and letters maintain their place on the campus in Cedar City.
Earlier this year, SUU also hosted the NSEE conference. Many of the organization's national member colleges also are small liberal arts schools.
School officers will receive the honor in October at a Florida ceremony.
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