Summer Programs

The Summer Internship Program is a condensed, 8-week version of our semester long programs.  Students gain hands-on professional experience through an internship in their field of interest, while also completing 6-credits worth of coursework.  A full program of professional development activities gives students the opportunity to develop their professional profiles and networks by connecting them to Bard NYC’s vast network of industry leaders across New York City.  Through our extra-curricular programming students explore and participate in the rich and diverse summer cultural life of New York City.  From film festivals and outdoor concerts, to museums and excursions across the city, students get to learn first-hand what makes New York City one of the most exciting places in the world. 
 
Bard NYC offers summer internships in the following areas:

• Human Rights and Social Justice
• International Affairs
• Media and the Arts
• Climate and Environmental Sustainability

Explore sample internships here.

Required Course: Core Seminar: Social Sciences OR Core Seminar: Arts & Humanities

• Core Seminar: Social Sciences
  • This core seminar is designed to connect ethical and social theory to the contemporary American workplace. As the world becomes more interconnected with the rise of AI, globalization, and the impacts of the pandemic, how has the workplace developed and changed? What role does ethics play in the workplace on the individual, organization, and societal level? We will apply ethical theories to specific workplace cases as well as examine our own ethical values.  On a practical level, we will also consider what it means to be a working adult in the 21st century with a liberal arts education. What is fundamental to what I am looking for in a career? How am I growing in my internship? How do I navigate work culture and proper work etiquette? How can one be ethical in the workplace?
• Core Seminar: Arts & Humanities
  • This course examines core concepts in art and aesthetics from three different angles. First, there is the historical development of an idea of beauty from perceptive cognition and its integrated discourses into a proper field of study and philosophical realm, following a long and erratic trajectory from Ancient Greece to post-modernity. Second, there is the internal layering of art into a couple of main interpretive facets, such as the anthropological vocabulary of symbols, the sociological categories of taste, and the psychological speculations of imagination, all of which enhance the very notion of aesthetic object into a constellation of meanings. Third, there are the more contemporary debates, particularly in New York and since the 1950s, around the status of art as an external form of technology, and industry, itself profoundly shaped by the material conditions of intersectional identities and a new openness to affective dispositions. Through these three approaches, supported as they will be by punctual examples and case studies from a variety of artforms, genres, and geographies, this course aims at allowing students to develop their own sensibility into a more imaginative and critical faculty, as well as gather a wider range of references, a richer palette for expressing their experiences, and a more diverse and robust reserve of tools to face the abundance of art.

In addition to the required core seminar, summer internship participants enroll in one other elective course of their choosing. Credits are not awarded for internships, rather the required core seminar situates students' internship experience within the scholarly literatures and debates that define relevant academic fields, reinforcing the critical connection between theory and practice.