What is ExL?
Beyond Classrooms: From Cuba to Italy, New Orleans to nearby neighborhoods, our experiential learning programs take students out of the traditional classroom and into the world. You may participate in a professional internship, a service-learning assignment, study abroad, or conduct research with one of Dornsife’s renowned faculty members.
Students who participate in experiential learning programs consider these the most transformative and empowering experiences of their undergraduate careers, helping them to develop new skills, find their voice, gain self-confidence, and determine their future path.
Explore countless opportunities to deepen your understanding of your chosen course or discipline, the world, and explore your own journey of self-discovery.
Create your ExL Experience
From learning and immersing yourself in another country to fighting for civil rights issues, ExL has a breadth of experiential programs available for students.
Agents of Change
Prison Education Project
Fisher Fellows
Agents of Change
Agents of Change helped me gain experience in the community advocacy and organizing as well as allowed me to financially support myself. Most students have to sacrifice one for the other, but AOC allowed me to do both. Now in my post grad, I’m working full time at both the legal aid and the government agency I interned with. This ExL program is something every school should have.
USC Trial Advocacy
The USC Trial Advocacy program taught me how important using my voice to advocate for myself and others is. Participating in mock trial is the BEST pre-law preparation out there; from learning the Federal Rules of Evidence to learning how to cross-examine a witness, I know these are skills I will use throughout my career as an attorney. Also, it has provided me access to many pre-law resources that I would not have gotten otherwise. This program is one example of how experiential learning has been essential to my undergraduate studies.
Fisher Fellows
The Fisher Fellowship has empowered me, through a fellowship of like-minded peers as well as with resources and connections, to give back to the community that surrounds USC. It’s also allowed me to fine-tune the organizing and community buildings skills I’ve developed in other experiential learning programs to become a more effective change-maker.
Beyond the Classroom
Through the Dornsife Experiential Learning opportunities, students leave the classroom for opportunities, throughout the world, to learn through doing–not just studying.
Students get out of the traditional classroom and into the real world to expand their interests and develop world views.
Maymester in Paris where students study abroad with Professor Cecilia Woloch.
Since 1972, some 100,000 USC students have taught in classrooms and provided more than a million service-hours to the neighborhoods around the university, as volunteers in USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project (JEP).
Two Agents of Change students earn prestigious Soros Justice fellowships to address school-to-prison pipeline.
Each received $57,000 to further their joint project exploring and highlighting via the media the school-to-prison pipeline and its role in the incarceration and criminalization of young people of color in low-income communities in Los Angeles.
50 Stories for 50 Years of JEP
As part of their celebration, JEP wants to highlight fifty of stories of inspiration, overcoming obstacles, of community, and so much more. Starting January 17th with the story of current Executive Director Susan Harris, JEP will reveal more and more stories until the end of the year.
Mock Trial Takes on Nationals
USC Mock Trial program advanced to the 2024 Mock Trial National Championships, competing in a network of over 400 collegiate programs to face the highest-scoring teams in the country. USC A took home 10th place in their bracket and USC B took home an honorable mention!