Experiential Course Empowers Undergrads to Build Workplace Exposure
Every term, dozens of undergraduate students sign up for PCJ Experiential Learning Capstone - an opportunity to apply classroom learning to real-life workplace experience. Taught by award-winning lecturer Benoît Gomis, it’s a marquee opportunity for students to leave the lecture hall and build relevant skills in a real-world setting.
The course features placement with local, national, or international not-for-profits or governmental organizations. Leaders from within those organizations guide teams of students to examine solutions to important problems.
Students concentrate on timely, policy-relevant challenges, ranging from how to better support refugees, to holding governments accountable for human rights violations. They are asked to engage in deep personal reflection, help teammates, and contribute their skills and talents to their community partners.
At the end of each experience, each team presents its findings related to their areas of focus, along with tools and suggestions that can assist or improve the organizations’ ability to meet their targets.
Gomis asks the same question at every final briefing, “What might you have done with another twelve weeks to work on this project?”
His question touches on a subtle but significant value of this course – learning how to work within boundaries while thinking bigger than the limits we are often subjected to.
More broadly, the Peace, Conflict and Justice (PCJ) program is designed to help students understand some of the most pressing challenges for humanity in the world: conflict, violence, inequality, and the pursuit of justice. The curriculum is necessarily interdisciplinary. Students explore how conflicts emerge, how they affect communities, and how institutions, policies, and collective action can play a role in mitigating some of the most harmful outcomes.
Gomis taught the Experiential Learning Capstone for the first time in 2025/2026 and has been teaching experiential learning courses for several years (including the Security Capstone Seminar in the Master of Global Affairs at the Munk School since 2019/2020). With global change, lived learning in workplace settings has also transformed. “I spend more time encouraging the students to be bolder, to feel empowered to challenge some widely held assumptions, to think creatively about some of the problems they're asked to tackle, and to be empathetic about the challenges some of our clients might be facing.”
One group, assigned to the Christie Refugee Welcome Centre and working under the mentorship of Executive Director Manny Wong, chose to build a tool that would allow client-facing refugee organizations to evaluate their interventions over time while identifying hidden barriers and their impacts on outcomes.
Student Mika Broder remarked on a primary observation.
“Refugees are navigating a system of overlapping challenges…employment affects mental health; Housing instability can undermine access to healthcare and other services. Language ability shapes both workforce participation and everyday navigation of institutions. Therefore, progress in one area can enable progress in another — but barriers in one domain can also cascade across others.”
Broder's team, coordinated by Eileen Ou and composed of Charlotte Burgess, Kit Wasan and Aden Zalesky, designed a framework to measure the effectiveness and impacts of refugee-serving organizations. By creating a way to generate data that shows outcomes, the result is an evidence-supported tool that has the potential to help refugees and refugee-serving organizations as they make the case for greater government and community support.
Other teams of students have taken up postings that range from the International Drug Policy Consortium to the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights and many others, with many of the opportunities stemming from connections Gomis himself has built through his subject matter expertise in illicit trade and terrorism. He regularly works with governments, think tanks, NGOs, companies and universities.
“Early on in my career, I realized that so much about work is not about the work itself. It's about being a clear communicator, a team player, giving and embracing feedback, having empathy, humility, and curiosity, and being willing to learn and change your mind. The various organizations I've worked for or with all had distinct norms and codes. For the students to get the opportunity to experience all that and learn how to navigate those intricacies to produce impactful work on incredibly important and timely issues - all of it in a guided environment - is tremendous.”
