Welcome to Grogan College Core!

We understand that college is an important gateway to your future—including a career that is both personally rewarding and sustainable. Therefore, professionalism and professional preparation are the centerpiece of Grogan College and its CORE curriculum.

To build professionals who are successful over the long term, Grogan blends a focus on professional preparation with the best in the liberal arts tradition to develop future professionals able to see the big picture, understand issues deeply, and develop lasting solutions. This is why we have created especially designed courses that not only emphasize professional development, but that also satisfy General Education requirements all UNCG students must meet. Grogan Core courses have low enrollments to allow for personalized learning and they are open only to Grogan College students.

Whether you plan to major in the performing arts, the humanities or one of UNCG’s Professional Schools, Grogan CORE is designed to provide you with essential competencies that will enable you to succeed in college and in your professional or artistic life beyond college.

In Grogan’s Core curriculum, you will work on developing the following professional competencies:

• Research and inquiry skills – Professionals in any field need to use evidence based judgment. Therefore, it is necessary to learn how to analyze and investigate a question, issue or problem. And it is important to be able to find relevant and reliable information, and to apply information to develop reasoned judgements about ways to solve issues. Grogan Core courses foreground problem and project based learning with a strong emphasis on inquiry and research skills.
• Collaboration and Team work skills – In today’s complex, diverse and ever changing world, effective solutions to big issues require input from multiple perspectives, backgrounds and diverse fields of study. Professionals must function successfully as members of diverse networks and professional teams. Therefore, Grogan College Core courses emphasize teamwork, collaboration and learning from and about diversity.
• Communication and Leadership skills – Professionals apply learning in real world settings to get the job done. Therefore, they must know how to communicate, explain, advocate and lead. Grogan Core courses provide regular and sustained coaching on effective communicating and ample opportunities to practice and receive constructive feedback.
• Integrity, ethics and a commitment to service, justice and the public good – In many cases professionals function as gatekeepers deciding who gets access to various resources and opportunities in business, health care, education, legal services and many other areas. Therefore, professionals must exhibit a high degree of personal integrity and commitment. They must put their client’s interests and the public good at the forefront of all that they do. Therefore, Grogan’s Core emphasizes professional ethics, personal integrity and developing an awareness and concern for equity, access and social justice.
• Integrated Learning and Lifelong Learning skills – To improve their performance and keep up with their field throughout their careers, professionals engage in continuous lifelong learning to enhance their skills and knowledge. This requires reflecting on successes and failures, noticing and evaluating needs for improvement, making connection across the span of your career and continuously growing and learning. Through our learning portfolio and capstone, the Grogan Core curriculum emphasizes these aspects of integrated, lifelong learning.
• Personal Satisfaction – Professionals engage in demanding practices that address important human needs and real-world problems. These problems often connect to their personal passion. Therefore, many professionals enjoy a high degree of personal satisfaction feeling that they are doing meaningful work that makes a difference that connects to their personal sense of purpose. In Grogan College, you will be encouraged to think deeply about your values, goals, and the big questions that stimulate your imaginations. Grogan will help you turn your passions into your career.

With these professional qualities and competencies in mind, Grogan CORE provides opportunities for first and second year students to develop professionalism and a clear professional identity.

Academic Requirements

Grogan Core Courses:  Grogan College is designed as a two-year experience.  Each semester that you are enrolled in Grogan, you will take one of the Grogan CORE courses. These are small, specially designed courses open only to Grogan College students. Regardless of the topic, all Grogan core courses meet UNCG General Education requirements and focus on developing essential professional competencies.

Learning Portfolio:  During their time in Grogan College, students complete an on-line learning portfolio by uploading certain key assignments and projects completed in their core courses as well as other significant learning experiences of their choosing.  To complete the portfolio, you must upload at least one significant example of your work in each of three categories—Self-Scholarships and Society. By recording and reflecting on their accomplishments, students connect learning across courses and experiences and document their development and growth.  

Capstone:  Building on your Grogan portfolio, as a sophomore in Grogan College you will participate in a self-designed capstone experience intended to pull together and integrate the most significant elements of your learning to catapult into your next big thing. Your capstone experience counts for course credit and it is intended to help you design an academic, professional and personal future that is meaningful to you.

Click here for a list of the Fall 2020 course offerings at Grogan College.

All Residential College students enroll in RC courses. These courses are open to students across all three Residential Colleges and offer a variety of themes and topics.

Key Components & Projects

Presentations and Performances

A major area of professional competence is communication. Your great ideas and bold plans won’t become a reality unless you express yourself effectively and persuade others to follow your lead. Therefore, Grogan College provides many opportunities for students to practice communicating by sharing their knowledge. For example, many Grogan core courses offer sustained coaching on writing and speaking and include a variety of in-class presentations. Also, there are Program wide expos like the Grogan Gallery where students display their work throughout Grogan Hall and explain its significance to faculty, staff and fellow students. Projects run the gamut from poster exhibits, Prezi’s and power point presentations to site-specific dances, dramatic performances or poetry and new music composed by students. Grogan also offers hands on mentoring and coaching for students who want to undertake original research and enter their findings in UNCG’s Undergraduate Research Expo. Bottom line: we want every Grogan student to find their voice and to use it.

Portfolio

Successful professionals are lifelong learners. They examine every experience—including mistakes–for the lesson they can learn and the opportunity to improve their game. They are “reflective practitioners”. In Grogan College, one important way that we help students develop the habits of reflective practice and lifelong learning is the Grogan learning portfolio. Beginning with move-in and orientation, and then throughout your time in Grogan, you will be adding to and reflecting on your portfolio in order to take stock of your learning experiences in college both inside and out of the classroom. Organized around Grogan’s key learning goals as well as your own interests, your individual portfolio will help you make connections across all of your learning experiences, discern your future path, demonstrate your growth and development, and show how you are preparing to accomplish your goals. Much more than a resume, your Grogan portfolio is both a learning tool and a way for you to tell a rich, personal story that demonstrates your knowledge and skills to future employers and clients.

Capstone

Building on your Grogan portfolio, as a sophomore in Grogan College you will participate in a self-designed capstone experience intended to pull together and integrate the most significant elements of your learning in order to catapult into your next big thing. Capstones can take many forms and they typically build on your portfolio and reflect your area of professional or artistic interest or a major issue you are passionate about. For example, your capstones might include a significant service learning or internship experience you undertake, or a presentation of your Grogan portfolio and how you have developed as a professional and a student, or it might be an artistic performance, business plan, or undergraduate research project. Whatever the form, students use the capstone to reflect, summarize, integrate and communicate the journey they have taken and the important lessons learned. As such, the capstone helps students in Grogan College ground learning in their personal sense of purpose and fulfillment while helping them communicate what they know and can do. In this way, Grogan students deepen the links between who they are, what matters to them and what they know how to do. Integrated learning, we believe, is the bedrock of professional commitment and integrity.