In its first year of existence, the Center for Civic Engagement through the Chicago Field Studies department is implementing a new summer immersion program, Engage Chicago.

Engage Chicago is an eight-week, two-credit program. Northwestern students will be placed at internships with Chicago-based public service organizations and will take a weekly seminar course, said Robert Donahue (Communication ’97), the associate director for CCE. The students will live in dormitories at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Donahue said students attend NU with the expectation that they will spend time in Chicago frequently.

“When I was a student, we would all leave with this understanding that we never really took advantage of Chicago,” Donahue said.

Students said their visits to Chicago are few and far between.

Aekta Patel, a Communication sophomore, said she estimates she goes to Chicago only a few times each quarter to shop or have dinner.

“I probably thought that I would go (to Chicago) more than I do right now,” Patel said. “I would really love to go into the cultural neighborhoods of Chicago more and go see other aspects besides just Michigan Avenue.”

Donahue said Chicago provides a unique opportunity to participate in public service in an urban setting.

“One of the best cities in the world to learn about civic engagement and how to make change in the world is Chicago,” he said. “If we took a summer period we could really give our students an opportunity to really be immersed in the city.”

Engage Chicago combines aspects of internships and summer courses, Donahue said.

“We want them to be learning in an academic way, we want them to be providing a fruitful service for the community and we want them to be sharing this together kind of living and learning community,” he said.

Engage Chicago will help place and match students with public service internships, Donahue said. The CCE staff looks “to find not only organizations that are doing good work but places where we feel like they’re well structured to make good use of a student intern.”

Engage Chicago is open to all undergraduates and applications are available online, he said. The program will accept about 20 students in its pilot year with hopes of expansion.

“This is a terrific opportunity to take the city seriously as a wonderfully complex set of both challenges and issues on the one hand, and resources and energy and capacity on the other,” Donahue said.

The seminar class, one of the components of Engage Chicago, will be taught by Jody Kretzmann, a professor in the School of Education and Social Policy.

Kretzmann added that his experiences helped form the idea for the program.

In the weekly class, students will learn about the issues and challenges facing Chicago through contemporary readings and guest speakers, he said.

Students will be exploring “all of the things that kind of make the dynamic of Chicago so continuously exciting,” Kretzmann said.[email protected]