Noncredit Course (NONCR-GP)

This non-credit course is an excellent opportunity for all incoming Wagner students to jump-start their academic journey relative to both the foundational content as well as the classroom experience of Wagner graduate coursework. It is required of all students who did not complete their bachelor's degree at a four-year institution in the U.S. and is open to all entering Wagner students. The course aims to achieve four things: 1. Create the foundation for an open, inclusive classroom experience where people can share and learn from the diverse educational and professional experiences students bring to the classroom. 2. Familiarize students with the type of active learning approaches typical of the Wagner classroom, including developing critical thinking skills, active dialogue and discussion, case studies, and group projects. 3. Ensure students have basic familiarity with the institutional and political dynamics at the core of the U.S. political system, understand how the U.S. system differs in significant ways from other political systems, and acquaint students with basic knowledge of the U.S. nonprofit sector. 4. Expose students to some core competencies and expectations in terms of professional communication, both written and verbal.

International Student Orientation is intended for all F-1 and J-1 international students beginning their first semester at Wagner and is a required piece of the Orientation Over Time process. This mandatory session will provide you with key information necessary to maintain your enrollment as a student studying on a visa, allow you to ask questions of staff, faculty, and peers, and prepare you for life at Wagner, NYU, and in New York City.

This interactive workshop serves as an introduction to the many NYU Libraries resources and services available to Wagner students that will help students develop skills appropriate to graduate-level research. In the session, we will cover fundamental research strategies that will prepare students for course assignments and Capstone projects. Students will develop awareness of valuable library resources, learn strategies for framing and conducting literature reviews, and learn about further support services including the NYU Data Services, who can assist with learning quantitative, qualitative, and geospatial analysis. The session concludes with some information about how to effectively cite and integrate sources, with a special focus on APA Style, which Wagner students will use most frequently. Through some short exercises, students will gain practice in developing a search strategy to find high-quality research resources, in situating your work within a larger scholarly context, and in citing scholarly and popular sources in your work.

Throughout this four-session workshop, students will use their experiences and education as the context for a series of career-related analyses based on the following four lenses: Issue, System, Organization, and Role. All discussions will be brought back to Composing Your Career (CYC), a framework for maximizing one?s time at Wagner based on the SEER strategy: Smart, Experienced, Engaged, and Reflective. All of this will lead to an action plan to maximize one?s time at Wagner in the pursuit of a successful public service career.

This workshop provides participants with the fundamental steps of how to plan and implement transformation initiatives using the PMP methodology and best practices. Project Management forms the basis for effectively delivering improvements to business processes, deploying new technologies, transformation using data and metrics and communicating change management. During the workshop key focus areas will be reviewed including, project initiation, project definition, creation of work breakdown structures, scheduling using Gantt charts and network diagrams, risk management, budgeting and controlling resources, quality assurance (testing), auditing and project closeout. Additionally, participants will learn the concepts of "Lean Six Sigma" and DAMAIC methodology.

This course will provide a field opportunity for students to investigate the current practices of an El Salvadoran social enterprise, Acceso Oferta Local – Productos de El Salvador, which aggregates agricultural and fish & seafood products procured from low-­income producers and fishers for sale to local off-­takers. This social enterprise has successfully scaled since its inception in 2013 to grow to over $5M in revenue along with supported claims of significant impact on more than 1,000 producer and fisher livelihoods and resulting paradigm shifts to practices of local sourcing. Students will investigate the success factors and challenges of the enterprises’ primary business of fruit and vegetable sourcing and make recommendations for the scaling of newer business opportunities related to fish & seafood expansion, vertical expansion into processed foods as well as prospective exporting. These opportunities will be viewed through the lens of social impact, financial return and stakeholder management.Students will have the opportunity to interview local producers and product buyers and develop frameworks for assessing scaling opportunities and making recommendations for the social enterprise’s evolution. The course will build off the Professor’s case on this enterprise entitled Acceso Oferta Local – A New Approach to Social Enterprise with an objective of using students’ findings and recommendations to contribute toward the development of an Addendum Case.

This 0-credit workshop will drill down on fundamentals of written English. We will cover punctuation, articles, passive/active voice, how and when to cite others’ work and best practices for self editing. Our focus will be on memos, but the lessons will be applicable to all written communications deliverables. Using short in class assignments and a memo you could possibly use in another class, the course is geared toward Wagner students who want to improve sentence mechanics.

This noncredit module focuses on those math skills that are essential to statistics, microeconomics, and financial management. Students taking quantitative courses are encouraged to take advantage of this review.

This short, non-credit class aims to give students an overview of the key elements of successful writing, and equip them with the tools to approach any writing assignment, from memos to emails to reports to research briefs. This class is designed to be a companion piece to other coursework, and students will be asked to bring in assignments from other courses to work on in class. Topics covered include introductions, structure and organization, paragraphs and sentences, and the use of evidence. All work will take place in class—there will be no additional assignments. Any student who attends for the duration of the course will have access to additional tutoring hours with the instructor through the end of the semester. Writers of all levels are welcome.

This non-credit, 3-session module introduces students to the basic functionalities of Microsoft Excel such as basic formulas, absolute versus relative cell reference, formatting, and time-value of money financial functions. The module is held in a computer lab and every student has a computer. It is intended for students with limited or no Excel experience, and is designed to be taken concurrently with CORE-GP 1021 (Financial Management).

The purpose of this 5-session workshop is to equip students with the basic foundations necessary to leverage the Python programming language and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in a public policy setting. As such, this course will cover variables, dictionaries, lists, loops, functions, and other concepts required to interact with a RESTful API.