Faculty, Staff, and Advisors

The XN team is centrally located at the university in the Office of the Chancellor within the Education Innovation division. This allows us to serve all colleges and campuses while focusing on our mission of providing accessible experiential learning within Northeastern courses and partnering with industry stakeholders who can offer students real-world experience to complement their course content.

Our team works with hundreds of faculty each year to embed XN partnered projects into electives, capstones, and independent studies/extracurricular courses in a variety of disciplines and in every college at Northeastern at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

XN matches projects with courses, demonstrating industry-academic alignment​. Experiential Partnership Managers support faculty leads and individual faculty members with planning and embedding XN projects in their courses.

  • Industry sponsors are sourced by the XN team or through faculty or students connections. 
  • Projects are virtually executed by students with a flexible schedule agreed upon by students and industry sponsors. 
  • Students work individually, in groups, or as a whole class to complete the project.
  • Students commit approximately 40 hours of work over an average of 6-8 weeks.
  • Projects can be embedded in any part of the course. 
  • Students and sponsors meet regularly to assess progress and receive feedback. 
  • XN projects help boost student engagement because students have the opportunity to apply academic concepts to real world projects. 
  • Refer to the XN Partnership Guidelines for details on expectations for students, faculty, and sponsors in XN projects. If sponsors request NDAs or IP agreements, faculty can facilitate signatures. Agreements must originate from the sponsor, with Northeastern University not entering as a party. Ensure students can share projects with faculty for support and grading. Consider allowing students to share final presentations with classmates for valuable feedback.
    • Note that faculty may not sign IP agreements based on university contracts, and students signing NDAs may be restricted from including project work in portfolios.
    • Negotiating NDAs is acceptable, considering differing perspectives.

Additional Opportunities to Engage with XN

Faculty, your network is vast and discipline-specific! Faculty-found partners and projects constitute a valuable source of in-course experiential learning opportunity for students. By documenting your own industry-embedded course project with XN we can help streamline communication, support you and the students throughout the course, and attribute XNPR attribute to your course. Additionally, adding the partner to Northeastern’s partnership ecosystem provides sponsors with future engagement opportunities available. To accurately document a faculty developed project, please send us the name of the course, course number, course CRN, a brief description of the project and partner contact information.

To submit your own project to be matched with an aligned course at Northeastern (with you acting as an outside sponsor), or if you’d like to distribute our flyer to your network which contains a link to our e-submission form, please review and submit here: NU Experiential Network 2024

For faculty keen on involving students in their research, XN supports creating a zero-credit, zero-tuition (zero-stipend) extracurricular course (-2964 or -5964) within your college.

This can be for open enrollment or selected students, providing a project engagement transcript without impacting degree audits or your course load.

For faculty interested in a project that is completed in-person and has a service learning component please contact the Community Engaged Teaching and Learning (CETR) Team.  CETR helps faculty integrate academics with community-engaged projects, aligning with both classroom and community goals. Students partner with various organizations to apply course material. Faculty members can collaborate with XN and CETR for experiential project opportunities.