Lisa Han remembers how she felt as a shy first-year accounting student attending job recruitment activities at the Desautels Faculty of Management.
“I remember going to events and standing by the snack table and being like, ‘OK, I need to talk to people. I don’t know how to,’” recalls Han, laughing at the memory.
Fast forward to her final semester at McGill where a poised and confident sounding Han is helping develop online content about networking skills for peers at Desautels.
The project is a student partnership with the Lewtas Office of Experiential Learning, which is creating a new co-curricular program to bolster students’ transferable skills.
“We're trying to create something that provides support for all students and allows them to really thrive within their experiential courses,” explains Leigh Korey, PhD, who leads the office.
With a government grant, the Office hired a team of students to help build a suite of online modules and workshops at Desautels for self-paced learning. The modules cover five themes: communication, teamwork, self-awareness and reflection, critical thinking, and career planning.
The networking module is by students for students, says Han, who thinks hearing tips from peers with fresh networking experience will resonate more deeply. “We want to make it interactive and engaging for students because this is something they’re choosing to learn in their own free time.”
Lisa Han
Experiential learning: a priority at Desautels
Hands-on learning is embedded in many activities across the Faculty, and since 2024, Bachelor of Commerce students must complete a three-credit experiential learning course to graduate.
At the heart of those efforts is the Lewtas Office of Experiential Learning, which launched in 2021 thanks to the generosity of alumnus Donald Lewtas, BCom’75, an ardent supporter of experiential learning.
Korey notes that both research and student feedback indicate the many benefits of this approach on learning outcomes. “Students are more motivated because they are more engaged – they can see the real-world applications of what they're learning,” she says.
It also benefits students with potential employers, who look for students’ skills, but also their ability to apply their knowledge, says Geneviève Bassellier, Vice-Dean of Programs at Desautels and an associate professor of Information Systems. “There’s a strong desire from employers to see that students have done something tangible, hands-on, in their journey.”
“The faculty mixes quite well the importance of learning about concepts and frameworks to shape students’ thinking, with how to apply that in a real context,” Bassellier says.
Another element behind the creation of the Lewtas Office, Korey says, was the realization that some students were benefiting from many experiential opportunities while others weren’t participating in any.
“One of Don Lewtas's main objectives with the Office was really to ensure that all students have an opportunity to partake in an experiential learning course or activity. That was the big goal that we went forward with.” He also wants students to have the chance to explore different paths to discover where their interests lie, Korey adds.
Experiential learning takes many forms in the Faculty, including courses, case competitions and study trips. “We have courses where there are live cases,” says Korey, such as a merger and acquisition unfolding in the marketplace that students analyze.
In other courses, industry liaison staffers help professors identify industry or community partners that have complementary projects that can be integrated into students’ coursework. “We have experiential learning models where an outside company comes in and says, here's what we need: We need a marketing plan,” Korey says.
“And then the marketing students apply the theories they’ve learned in class to create a realistic, potentially actionable marketing plan that they propose to the outside company.”
Last summer, Bassellier co-taught a primarily online course for students who were doing internships around the world. The idea was to make their internships a more meaningful and reflective learning experience and allow them to earn credits for it. The course is already at capacity for its second run this summer.
‘So impressed by these students’
Han and the 16 other students who are developing the modules for the Experiential Learning Student Partnership, received training in pedagogy, transferrable skills development and online content creation.
“I have been so impressed by these students,” Korey says. “Once they started working on their projects and came back with their initial proposals, I could not believe the thought that went into them.”
The project is also meant to be a rich learning experience for the student partners – and it has certainly proved rewarding for Han, who plans to become a chartered accountant and will start working for PWC after she graduates from McGill this spring.
“Working on this initiative has given me the opportunity to learn how to design engaging online content and to think critically about how concepts are best communicated to a student audience,” Han says. “Building this module made me think about what I wish I had known as a first-year student and channeling that into something concrete and useful for others has been really fulfilling.”