Program Overview
Chicago Field Studies (CFS) is an experiential-learning program that allows a student to intern in a field of their choice while thinking critically about that work in an attached course for credit.
CFS is committed to the notion that framing internships academically can help students explore their interests and gain practical experience, while learning to contemplate the currents that shape working lives socially, politically, ethically, or otherwise by field.
The largest academic internship program at Northwestern, CFS enrolls over 500 students a year in courses such as “Business Field Studies” and “Field Studies in Public Health,” encompassing an array of internship sites across Chicagoland and beyond. While CFS courses vary by topic, all entail readings, assignments, and activities that challenge students to grapple with fundamental questions about their fields and experiences.
CFS staff offer intensive career advising before and during the internship. They facilitate internship opportunities with local organizations, guide students to develop professional communication skills, and connect students with resources, including support for International Students, FGLI students, and students receiving Financial Aid.
A program of Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, CFS welcomes students from all disciplines except for undergraduates in their first year. The CFS application requires students to demonstrate good academic standing and personal readiness for a quarter spent interning. We strive to make meaningful internship-course experiences accessible to as many students as possible while preserving small class sizes and full advising support for students.
To serve graduate students, CFS partners with the NU Center for Civic Engagement on the Graduate Engagement Opportunity and the Chicago Humanities Initiative. CFS also partners with the Center for Civic Engagement on Engage Chicago, an immersive civic summer program for undergraduates.
Program-Wide Learning Objectives
Experiential-learning is necessarily experimental and idiosyncratic. It varies by student, field, site, and course, which means that students will leave CFS with unique lessons and skills.
Even so, all CFS courses teach students to:
- Reflect on the relationship between theory and practice in their chosen fields in order to deepen understanding of their major, minor, or related academic pursuits.
- Cultivate curiosity about their fields of interest and other people’s work experiences.
- Identify and analyze critical trends and issues in their fields and/or in work generally.
- Express ideas clearly and contribute to discussions effectively.
- Navigate their internships professionally and thoughtfully.
CFS Learning Objectives correlate with the WCAS imperatives to Observe, Critique, Reflect, Express. CFS courses entail additional Learning Objectives specific to each course.
Program History
The Chicago Field Studies Program dates back to a period of rapid expansion in experiential learning that took shape at Northwestern and across the US from the mid 1960’s through the mid 1970’s.
In the late 1960’s, the Civil Rights Movement on campus and beyond spurred calls for more community-engaged research and learning. In 1968, Professor Raymond Mack and colleagues launched the Northwestern Center for Urban Affairs (now the Institute for Policy Research) to direct university research towards local urban policy challenges. In the Winter Quarter of 1970, the Center piloted the Undergraduate Field Study in Urban Affairs in partnership with faculty in Sociology and Group Communications. The program had students working with local organizations (such as Businessmen for the Public Interest and the Chicago Council of Lawyers) for most of the week and then returning to campus for a lively Friday seminar on urban policy and community-engaged work, where they reflected on their experiences, spoke with class guests, and worked on research projects.
From the start, that program mingled an ethnographic bent with the spirit of service-learning and professional skill-building. Professor John McKnight explained, “We want the students to be participant observers. [...] One of our people is working on an inventory of legal services in the city and hopefully will develop from this experience some idea of society” (Neubauer). By that time, Northwestern had a couple of internship-based programs in fields where clinical experience had long been a norm (such as nursing and teaching), but the Undergraduate Field Study in Urban Affairs was trying something new, with little infrastructure in place. One student in that first class reported, “The first few days at the Journalism Review I was kind of shook. [...] No one knew exactly what I was supposed to do. Then I found my niche. It’s great. I am learning a lot about city government that I never realized before, and I’m meeting a lot of interesting people” (Neubauer).
Around the same time, the faculty-led “Community of Scholars” report made two key recommendations for building social and curricular integration on campus that would influence Northwestern for years to come: residential colleges and interdisciplinary programs. The residential arm of these initiatives began in 1972 with the College of Urban Studies, later renamed the College of Community Studies (now the College of Cultural & Community Studies or CCS). This living space quickly became a hub of academic and extra-curricular engagement with local community members and policymakers through partnerships with the Center for Urban Affairs. By the mid-1970s, the Center and CCS had turned that first experiment in community-engaged, on-the-job learning into the interdisciplinary Chicago Field Studies Program.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, CFS increasingly responded to the growing demand for internships in a wide range of fields by leaning into the program’s ethnographic roots. Under the direction of faculty in Anthropology, students learned to approach their internships as participant-observers, whether working in a local non-profit, a law firm, or an investment bank.
In the mid-2000's and 2010’s, the program expanded considerably. Under the direction of Professor James Farr (Political Theory) and Associate Director Karen Allen, CFS deepened its roots in community-engagement and John Dewey’s theories of experiential education while making internship opportunities available to many more students across majors and professional fields. This period saw the development of courses such as Field Studies in Civic Engagement, Field Studies in Social Justice, Field Studies in Public Health, Field Studies in Humanities, Field Studies in Environment and Sustainability, and the online Field Studies in Business Culture (for students interning far from Chicago) alongside the revamping of curriculum in Business Field Studies, Legal Field Studies, and a cornerstone of the CFS offerings, Field Studies in the Modern Workplace.
During that period, CFS also solidified ties with the Northwestern Center for Civic Engagement through the development of several programs directly inspired by that very first cohort of the Undergraduate Field School for Urban Affairs. Each year, the Engage Chicago Program places undergraduates in local nonprofit and government internships while they live and learn together in a fully immersive summer experience. The Graduate Engagement Opportunity (GEO) places graduate students from diverse fields in research-oriented civic internships that dovetail with their graduate studies. And the Chicago Humanities Initiative (CHI) offers humanities doctoral students specialized training and internship experiences in public humanities, deepening Northwestern collaboration with local cultural institutions and community organizations along the way.
CFS now maintains internship partnerships with hundreds of organizations. We boast a dynamic interdisciplinary cohort of instructors that mixes full-time CFS faculty with field-practitioners and stand-out graduate students. And our small but mighty advising team guides well over 500 students a year through internship searches and experiences that enrich and complement their learning for years to come.
See our Annual Report for a deeper dive into CFS.
Sources:
“Community of Scholars: A Point-by-Point Outline.” Daily Northwestern, 7 Nov. 1969, p. 1.
Neubauer, Chuck. “On the Job Learning: NU Students in Urban Programs.” Daily
Northwestern, 9 Feb. 1970, p. 5.
Donahue, Robert. ‘Whatsoever Things Are True:’ A Case Study on Civic Engagement at Northwestern University During the 20th Century. Master’s Thesis 2024