Academic Life

Career Services

Wake Forest University’s Office of Personal and Career Development (OPCD) equips students with the tools and confidence to navigate the often daunting path from college to career.

And our unique approach yields results.

We’re one of very few top national universities to offer five college-to-career courses for credit. The OPCD developed Ready7, a step-by-step process that gives students a clear set of accomplishable actions to be prepared, confident, and ready for career and life.

Students engage with employers through hundreds of experiences, including industry-specific Career Treks, career fairs, “boot camps,” and diversity recruiting events. After graduation, students will continue to be supported throughout their careers by the national award-winning Alumni Personal and Career Development Center.

Early and intentional engagement: that’s the philosophy of the OPCD – and Wake Forest as a whole.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

opcd.wfu.edu

The Engaged Liberal Arts

Wake Forest University embraces the Engaged Liberal Arts.

This philosophy is the cross section where classroom concepts meet real-world experience. It emphasizes the strengths of liberal-arts learning: flexibility, creativity, problem solving, communication, critical thinking, and analysis.

We invite students to explore themselves and their world, as global citizens committed to discovering their passions and talents, and to lead lives in keeping with our motto of Pro Humanitate.

And for our faculty, the Engaged Liberal Arts is a spectrum that invites inventiveness to engage students in experiential learning across disciplines and areas of study. Some include short classroom exercises; others are entire project-based courses. It might be a series of talks interpreting a film through the lens of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Health and Exercise Science, or French. It could be combining literature with physics for a semester-long collaboration to teach STEM to elementary-school students, or even an in-class performance of a scene from a Spanish play to provide perspective and context for an advanced language course.

It’s about embracing the interdisciplinary culture of the liberal arts to achieve deeper understanding in order to meet the world’s needs.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

college.wfu.edu

Entrepreneurship

Do you have the next big idea? Pitch your idea and get selected for the Startup Lab in Entrepreneurship, where you’ll learn how to develop concepts into ventures. Our accomplished faculty are innovators and thought leaders in their fields, and they provide coaching and mentoring in a robust and vibrant environment.

Our students have made careers out of ideas developed in this program, and their products have been featured on Shark Tank, the Today Show and “Oprah’s Favorite Things” list.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

entrepreneurship.wfu.edu

Environment and Sustainability

Your generation’s impact on humanity will be defined through sustainability and the collective response to the need for climate justice. With a goal of climate neutrality by 2040, a commitment to sustainability education, and an emphasis on developing emerging leaders, sustainability is simply a part of who we are.

Here at Wake, you will have the opportunity to learn, connect, engage, and shape your own sustainability contribution to the world. The Environmental Program offers two majors and two minors where students experience real-world learning. And you may engage in global projects and research, such as rainforest conservation in the Peruvian Amazon, exploring coral reefs in Belize, or writing about climate change in Alaska. Students can also become a peer leader for sustainability, connect and cultivate in the Campus Garden, or volunteer with a sustainability student or community organization.

We hope you will join us in the Wake Forest commitment to minimize our environmental footprint through LEED-certified construction, energy and water conservation, waste reduction and diversion, alternative transportation, landscaping and tree care, and more.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

sustainability.wfu.edu
env.wfu.edu

Leadership and Character

The Program for Leadership and Character helps students think about how to live better. We teach students that leadership is the capacity to inspire, support, and influence others to work toward a shared purpose and that character is the set of virtues that enables us to lead authentic, integrated lives that promote the flourishing of individuals and communities.

Our program uses innovative teaching, creative programming, and cutting-edge research to transform the lives of students, foster an inclusive culture of leadership and character at Wake Forest, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.

Wake Forest awards scholarships to Leadership and Character Scholars. These are students committed to developing their leadership and character at Wake Forest. The Leadership and Character Scholars Program is designed to strengthen students’ sense of community, inform their values and vocation, and prepare them to serve their communities well beyond our campus.

As part of our mission to effect a broader conversation around character-centered leadership, we host conferences in partnership with the Oxford Character Project that feature leaders and scholars in a variety of fields and disciplines.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

leadershipandcharacter.wfu.edu

Study Abroad

Studying abroad is a dream, and Wake Forest will help you to make it a reality.

Most Wake Forest students choose to study abroad/away. In fact, more than 80% of our undergraduates have an academic study-abroad experience. This number is among the highest in the nation and puts us perennially in the Top Five for study-abroad participation. We offer customized advising through the Center for Global Programs & Studies, where students meet one-on-one with an advisor to find the best study-abroad program for them.

Many of those courses are directly through Wake Forest. Our university owns three residential-house programs in London, Vienna, and Venice. (We’re actually the only Top Thirty national university to own three international houses.) In addition, we operate other semester-length, center-based programs in Spain, England, Japan, Chile, and France.

All give time for scholarly pursuit – but also the experiential sort, allowing time to wander, explore, and discover.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

studyabroad.wfu.edu

Undergraduate Research

Through our Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA) Center, we help students find professors, and vice-versa, to explore shared areas of interest, alert them to funding opportunities, showcase their research, and provide support for class, conference, and publication work.

We want fully and publicly to support research that expands our worldviews, helps us come to terms with the world’s irreducibility, and shapes and reshapes our interpretations of this complex world.

Examples of our activities?

• We provide summer stipends and housing to students engaged in scholarly and creative activities with WFU faculty mentors,
• organize campus-wide activities to showcase undergraduate research and creative work, including annual Research Day presentations,
• promote and support participation at professional meetings by student researchers and their faculty mentors, including national and regional disciplinary conferences,
• offer practical and pedagogical workshops and discussions for both undergraduates and faculty on the importance of undergraduate research practices,
• and develop and employ assessment tools that measure and track outcomes of undergraduate mentored scholarly and creative activities.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

ureca.wfu.edu

Wake Downtown

Wake Downtown anchors three programs–Engineering, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery–in the heart of downtown Winston-Salem in a district known as the Innovation Quarter.

With Biotech Place and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine just steps away, undergraduates have the opportunity to perform research in a variety of settings. Not to mention that housed in the very same building as Wake Downtown is the Wake Forest University School of Medicine Bowman Gray Center for Medical Education, providing opportunities to collaborate with medical school faculty and students, as well as connections to clinical volunteering and shadowing.

As a host to rotating student art exhibitions in addition to courses in the arts and humanities, Wake Downtown is more than just STEM. Wake Downtown serves as an interdisciplinary hub, offering courses like Literature of the City, Movement and the Molecular, and Street Photography in the same building where Virology, Tissue Engineering, and Computer Aided Design are taught. It reimagines how a strong liberal arts background can enhance an education in Engineering and the Biomedical Sciences.

A short and convenient shuttle ride from campus, Wake Downtown brings students into Winston-Salem’s vibrant urban scene. In the downtown area, you’ll find art-walks, festivals, bike races, concerts, community yoga, and over 80 restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries. Wake Downtown offers additional connection points to the community, with students tackling local problems through their senior capstones, using 3-D printing to produce prosthetic arms, and volunteering through our STEM mentoring programs.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

wakedowntown.wfu.edu

Wake the Arts

At Wake Forest University, the arts belong to everyone, regardless of major. From the studios and stages of Scales Fine Arts Center to our galleries and museum-quality art collection, our students combine creative ingenuity with scientific rigor and business acumen. In fact, 93% of our students who participate in performing-arts organizations major in something other than the arts. To encourage that cross-disciplinary involvement, Wake Forest offers the Interdisciplinary Arts Center, our campus hub for connecting chemists and choreographers, painters and programmers, to produce new forms of impact in unexpected places.

Wake Forest seeks out creative students by offering Presidential Scholarships for those who show exceptional talents in art, dance, debate, music, and theatre. These scholars don’t always pursue a major in the area of their talent, but they do participate actively in that activity on campus, fostering our incredible interdisciplinary culture.

One of those activities is the Student Union Art Buying Trip. Wake Forest sends a group of selected students to New York City to purchase important contemporary artwork to add to our world-class collections. We also take student groups to the top-tier Venice Biennale on a regular basis. Locally, the Reynolda House Museum of American Art and Gardens as well as the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) are close by and open with free admission for all Wake Foresters.

And for life after Wake, DeacLink is our exclusive arts alumni network, connecting students with successful producers, gallerists, stage designers, performers, and more – as they become part of the international Wake the Arts family.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

wakethearts.wfu.edu

Wake Washington

Be an intern by day and a scholar by night in our nation’s capital. Monday through Thursday, Wake Forest students intern with government entities, nonprofits and private organizations. Evenings are dedicated to coursework taught by Wake Forest faculty.

Every Friday, students take private tours, interact with guest speakers or visit world-class museums. Each semester, 14-16 students participate in this competitive program, which earns academic credit. Wake Washington offers a deep dive into D.C. culture that has jump-started the careers of many Wake Forest graduates.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

washington.wfu.edu