•Engage with other activist students who prioritize social impact over personal gain
•Learn social entrepreneurship outside of a commerce-focused MBA program
•Gain a global perspective by earning a Masters degree in Social Enterprise from a top ranked international relations school
•Create a customized specialization from courses taught throughout the university
•Study in a practitioner-oriented, real-world based program aimed at doers, not scholars
•Build your professional network by being based in Washington DC, a city with a large and vibrant social enterprise sector
The Program is intended to support SIS students who want to become social entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs or infrapreneurs. They drive societal change by providing innovative, economically sustainable solutions to public problems.
This is not a slogan; it’s the organizing principle of our Program. The Social Enterprise Masters is designed to serve as a flexible incubator or accelerator for your ideas and plans. It does this in two ways:
•You have freedom to choose 6 courses (almost half of those required for your Masters) around your personal interests. This gives you an opportunity to explore the many facets of this rapidly evolving field using courses from across the graduate programs of American University. Or you can use this flexibility to deeply immerse yourself in a specific subject, region, or technique, and create your professional identity around it.
•Most Social Enterprise courses and your Capstone Practicum involve real world projects, and many of these are about issues, people, and organizations you select. Some of our students connect these projects to jobs or internships; others use them as steps toward launching or growing a venture.
Watch our videos and talk to our students and alums about how they’ve done this. Everyone’s story is different.