Category: Mission in the Curriculum

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2022 SCS Dean’s Report Highlights the Role of Mission and Values in Forging Ahead as a Community

The 2022 SCS Dean’s Report, which covers Academic Year 2021-2022, is the focus of this week’s Mission in Motion. The report tells a deeper story about how the School uniquely manifested Georgetown and Jesuit values throughout the year. 

Each year, the SCS Dean’s Report offers a meaningful review of the School’s most significant work during the Academic Year and its vision for the year ahead. I like to think of this annual exercise as an Examen of sorts, given the document’s reflective spirit and the wide variety of student, staff, faculty, and alumni perspectives that give the report its life. In addition to individual articles authored by a breadth of voices, the report uses facts and figures to present a holistic snapshot on the state of SCS.

The framing of each report is instructive because it communicates to its readers something important about how the School lived out its prior year of work. This year’s document, “Forging Ahead,” tells the story in a series of reflections about how SCS returned from the pandemic to both pre-existing, pre-pandemic habits and to new ways of teaching, learning, and working together. As Dean Otter offers in her opening reflection, the balance of old and new ways of proceeding are reflected in the unique ways that SCS inspirits Georgetown and Jesuit values in its work: “The Dean’s Report is only a snapshot of achievements across our varied portfolio, and the diverse stories herein capture our community’s perseverance, and also our profound commitment to enacting our Georgetown and Jesuit values.” The document then provides multiple concrete examples of how SCS has put the mission into motion during Academic Year 2021-2022.

Many of the highlighted examples of work should be familiar to readers of this SCS Mission in Motion blog. For example, Miranda Mahmud, Manager of Communications, tells the story of Summer High School Programs returning to the Hilltop. You can read this past Mission in Motion post to learn more about the deeply mission-aligned Summer College Immersion Program (SCIP). Dr. Sherry Steeley, Associate Teaching Professor, goes into depth about the collaboration between the SCS English Language Center and Georgetown’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security that provided direct English language and professional development support to Afghan refugees (the blog shared more about this partnership in a post: “Serving a Community in Dispersion: Reflections on Sharing English Language Learning with Afghan Refugees”). And I authored a piece about how SCS celebrated the Ignatian Year 500 through a set of dedicated activities covered by Mission in Motion throughout 2021 and 2022. The article explores the special events, retreats, and experiential pilgrimages that characterized Georgetown’s embrace of its Ignatian heritage in this milestone year of celebration.

The annual publication of the SCS Dean’s Report is more than a static document about a point in time. The words that comprise this document, a project undertaken by a dedicated team of SCS staff, are living testimony to the School’s enduring commitment to Georgetown and Jesuit values. I hope you will take a closer look at this year’s report and reflect from your unique position in the SCS community about how you have forged ahead over the last year of life and work.

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Welcome Video Invites SCS Students to Seek Something Greater at Start of New Semester

This week’s post is about a new welcome video shared with SCS students that invites reflection and meaning-making during the early stages of a new semester. You can watch the video and then explore the Spirit of Georgetown. 

What does it feel like to begin something new? When you start a new experience for the first time, what are you paying attention to? What grabs your awareness? How do you transition from the beginning to the next stages of a new thing? 

These are the kinds of questions that all students at SCS ask when a new semester starts. Whether you’re a continuing student steadily or quickly making progress in your degree or non-degree program, or just starting out at the School, every student grapples with big questions in the first few days and weeks of a new semester. So often, in my experience, new students are navigating a mix of emotions related to a range of the student experience. There might be nerves about logistics and work-life balance, such as: How can I make this academic program fit into my daily life? Others might be uncertain about their course selections and eager to better understand what their faculty members are like. And other concerns might be about the social aspect of the learning experience: Will I fit in here? Do I belong? 

One of my favorite lines from the author T.S. Eliot is that “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.” The lesson that we can take from Eliot, I believe, is that a new semester is as good a time as any to consider the deeper meaning of our time at Georgetown. The crunch of early semester business might not seem like an opportune time for deeper reflection, but I believe that the first weeks of a new experience provide the best opportunity to get in touch with the bigger picture of our lives as we navigate the details of the day-to-day. 

Luckily at Georgetown, we have a set of resources and tools for students to do the work of meaning-making about their learning experiences. The Spirit of Georgetown, 10 values distilled from five centuries of Jesuit history and educational innovation, facilitate this kind of deeper exploration.

So as the dust settles on the first few weeks of the semester, the SCS Mission and Ministry team offers a new welcome message to help students consider the deeper meaning of their student experience.

We hope students will receive the message at a fruitful time in the life of the semester, perhaps at a time that students are more eager to pursue some of their bigger questions than they were in week one. Some of these questions might be: How is my coursework informing my reflection about what kind of professional I want to become? What are my unique gifts and talents and how can I apply them in class assignments and extra-curricular opportunities? What is there about being a Georgetown student that goes beyond what happens in my classes? 


SCS students are supported through various programs and events to seek greater meaning, purpose, and belonging. Retreats are great (like this upcoming Graduate and Professional Student retreat) for this kind of structured reflection. And there are other ways that SCS accompanies the spiritual life of its students. New experiences, like starting a graduate program after years in the workforce or transitioning into an entirely new career path, can be filled with uncertainty and worry. But these experiences can also serve as invaluable opportunities to discern how we are called to seek something greater in our daily lives.

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Labor Day Presents Opportunity to Reflect on the Deeper Meaning of Work

As a professional school, SCS is committed to transforming the lives and careers of lifelong learners and does this, according to the School’s mission, in order to “improve employability and develop workforces; and to contribute to building a civic-minded, well-informed, and globally aware society.” On the eve of the Labor Day holiday, it is fitting that we reflect on the nature of work and how such reflection can inspire our actions as members of the SCS community. How can we infuse the preparation of lifelong learners for professional practices that reflect the mission and values of the Spirit of Georgetown? How can we as diverse professional members of this community strive to live out an understanding of the “work” of society in a way that justly honors workers and fosters greater equity and the common good?

Labor Day, intended as a holiday that honors the American labor movement, has the potential to give rise to deeper reflection about the contributions of laborers of all kinds in the work of the nation. The themes of work and the proper place of work in our lives are taken up by the teachings of diverse religious and spiritual traditions. Pope Francis, for example, has written extensively in recent documents about the need for political, economic, and social structures that support the dignity of all workers, most especially those marginalized or oppressed by these systems. In his teaching document Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis calls for the realization of “integral human development” through the creation of economic systems and practices that value community production above exploitative models of economic growth that simultaneously harm the environment and workers. 

These ideas from Pope Francis echo a long tradition of Catholic Social Teaching and its seven principles, which includes “The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers.” This principle maintains that: 

“The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God’s creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected – the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.” 

At Georgetown, advancing the dignity of work is evident in a number of University initiatives, including the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor whose purpose is to develop creative strategies and innovative public policy to improve workers’ lives. And at SCS, programs across the School consider pressing ethical questions about labor within the curriculum. For example, the Master’s in Supply Chain Management has been exploring how supply chain issues and inflation have adversely impacted the charity sector (“Helping Charities Defend Against Inflation’s Double Punch”). 

As a values-based professional education institution, it is important that we regularly consider the dignity of labor and the rights of workers. My hope is that this Labor Day provides time and space to pause and reflect on just principles of work and how we as Hoyas can join in contributing to a society and a world that brings these principles to life. 

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New to SCS? An Introduction to Georgetown’s Mission and Values in Four Points 

This is an exciting time of year at Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies. With the summer calendar coming to a close, our attentions turn to the beginning of the fall semester. While the academic programs at SCS tend to start for students on a rolling basis throughout the year, the inauguration of the fall semester has a special calendar significance at SCS. With new student, staff, and faculty orientations soon underway, this is a good opportunity to offer a brief introduction to our University’s distinctive mission and values and how they will influence your Georgetown experience. 

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This week’s post introduces the Spirit of Georgetown to new members of the SCS community. 

Many new members of our community ask similar questions at this time of year: What does it mean to be part of Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the United States? What’s so different about an education inspired by the Jesuit tradition? 

There is a longer story here than a short blog post allows (If you’re a student and really curious about the deeper answer to this question, you might consider taking a special free elective offered at SCS called “Jesuit Values in Professional Practice.” Similar seminar opportunities are available for faculty and staff). 

Here are four important ways that the University’s Jesuit mission and values will come to life in your time at Georgetown. 

  1. SCS is committed to sharing the Spirit of Georgetown, the 10 values distilled from five centuries of the Jesuit tradition of education, in an inclusive and invitational way that respects a plurality of religious and philosophical perspectives. This is why the University’s Office of Mission and Ministry houses a large multi-faith team of chaplains and staff that are available to spiritually accompany students, faculty, and staff across the campuses. The mission of Georgetown comes alive in a unique way for each individual person and no one will have the exact same experience as someone else. 
  1. Academic excellence is core to realizing Georgetown’s mission. This means that our rigorous and high-quality style of professional education is not by accident but an outgrowth of a living tradition that strives for the highest standards of teaching and learning as a way of reverencing the divine. At SCS, you’ll likely notice this commitment in the innovative and creative uses of technology to enhance the learning process. 
  1. A signature value of Jesuit education is a commitment to being People for Others. In this way, all learning, teaching, and working has a potential connection to supporting social justice and the common good. You will see this manifested in community service outside the classroom, course projects that focus on the needs of marginalized persons and groups, opportunities for social impact entrepreneurship, and the University’s public advocacy for justice. 
  1. Finally, you might find that “Cura Personalis,” or the value of Care for the Whole Person, is more than a superficial buzzword – it’s a deep-seated commitment to paying attention to all facets of the human person. Being a student at SCS is more than acquiring technical knowledge or skills; it is about attending to the emotional, spiritual, social, and physical aspects of developing as a well-rounded professional. A mission-committed faculty and staff are key to making this aspiration a reality. As a student, you can take advantage of this commitment through retreats, meditation, and other co-curricular experiences that animate Georgetown’s striving to form graduates who are generous life-long learners in the service of others. 

The start of a new semester is always filled with a mix of emotions. Whether you’re feeling mostly excited or mostly nervous (or a mix of both) about this new experience, I hope you find some comfort in the mission-based resources that are here to accompany you along the way.

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SCS Course “Thinking to Thrive” Brings Jesuit Values into Ethical Decision-Making

In working toward its mission to “deliver a world-class, values-based education to a diverse array of communities and individuals throughout their academic and professional careers,” Georgetown SCS offers a range of degree and non-degree learning experiences. Professional Bootcamps are dynamic six- to 12-week programs filled with knowledge, skills, and critical and strategic thinking intended to help boost the career prospects of professional learners. And other SCS programs, Professional Bootcamps strive to integrate Georgetown values into their intensive courses. 

This week’s post explores the “Thinking to Thrive” course offered through the Georgetown SCS Professional Bootcamps. 

One such example of intentional integration of mission and values is the featured bootcamp course “Thinking to Thrive,” designed to help students make better decisions. Taught by Stewart Brown, a management consultant with over 40 years of experience as a planner on the tactical, operational, and strategic levels in both government and civilian commercial enterprises, “Thinking to Thrive” operates from the assumption that a new set of leadership skills is needed for junior managers and senior executives in the 21st century. The course prepares emerging professional leaders to become “flexible, adaptable, multidisciplinary problem-solvers and change makers” through an exploration of how biases and fallacies cause errors in judgment and choice. Along the way, students assess a range of models for decision processes and tools, articulating each framework’s strengths as well as its limitations. 

“Thinking to Thrive” features a dedicated module on the role of ethics in decision-making. And like the ethics curricula in other SCS courses, this module introduces students to the resources and toolkits of ethical choice-making in the Jesuit tradition of discernment. This session is set up as a rich space for open-ended conversation as students engage difficult questions about how to bring to life ethical principles in ethically challenging work settings and situations. As a professional education program focused on the needs of adult learners, the objective of this module is not reflection for its own sake. Instead, students are challenged to make direct connections to their own professional development by articulating the ethical meaning of their own professional experiences.

One of the course materials in this module that explicitly connects the discussion of ethics in decision-making to the Spirit of Georgetown is an article by Kirk Hanson, senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Hanson offers five themes that differentiate the distinctiveness of learning ethics for managers and executives in a Jesuit school: 

  1. The development of the moral and spiritual character of the manager;
  2. The responsibility to use one’s managerial skills for the benefit of ‘others’; 
  3. A concern for the welfare of employees in the manager’s organization; 
  4. A focus on the social impact of business and organizational decisions; and 
  5. A special concern for the poor and marginalized frequently left out of the economy. 

By the end of the session on ethics in “Thinking to Thrive,” students have spent intentional time engaging with the Jesuit tradition of education. The discussion always surfaces new insights about the relevance of the Jesuit framework of ethical decision-making. A course that presents models of critical and reflective thinking as a necessary skill set for today’s aspiring managers and executives helps SCS bring its mission and values to life by meeting the interdisciplinary challenges of the 21st century.

For more information and inquire, check out the Professional Bootcamps at SCS!