Launch Your Future
Launch is our unique approach to undergraduate education, where life and career readiness is built right into the Drew experience. Launch provides a structure for each student to identify a purpose, a pathway, and a plan for achieving life and career goals across their four years at Drew—and beyond.
Offered exclusively by Drew, the Launch framework guarantees that each and every student graduates:
Experienced. Students complete at least two applied immersive experiences: career builders like internships, research, on-campus jobs, student leadership and more. They’re required for graduation and documented in transcripts, making your résumé stand out in the stack. Students leave Drew with the meaningful experience preferred by 94% of employers hiring new college grads.
Skilled. Students build a set of transferable workplace skills, learned in the classroom and applied in immersive experiences. From critical thinking to problem solving, from digital proficiency to interpersonal communication, these are lifelong skills that adapt across all career paths and workplace settings. And they’re the skills most sought by today’s employers.
Networked. Students build a network of mentors to guide and support them. They’re a multilayered team of faculty, alums, counselors, potential employers and other expert advisors cultivated by you (with assistance from us). You leave Drew with your own custom network of life, career and personal mentors—for a world where 85% of jobs are filled through networking connections.
What Launch Delivers
Our new Launch path for success guarantees purpose-driven, experience-based career readiness for every student, steeped in a connection to the lifelong, worldwide Drew community. Launch challenges students to grow and give back, to learn and connect with others, creating a foundation for the future.
While each student’s experience is unique, every Launch journey draws on a framework of foundational components:
Surefire Success. Great outcomes prove it. An impressive 94% of Drew graduates are employed or in grad school within six months of graduation. Alumni of our Launch program have the skills-based, network-supported experience that connects them with opportunity.
Network of Mentors. One mentor is marvelous—even better is the Launch community-development model of mentorship. Each student is guided in building a coordinated, multilayered network of academic, career and personal advisors while at Drew—to take with them into the world.
Résumé-Ready Experiences. Every Drew student graduates with at least two immersive experiences that demonstrate the application of skills, knowledge and professionalism in a real-world setting. These career-starting experiences are a key requirement of Launch and are documented in transcripts.
Powerful Community. Here in The Forest, a vibrant, diverse, friendly, generous and supportive campus community makes Launch possible. Grounding Launch within the close-knit Drew community empowers students to find their best selves in a wealth of campus activity and a world of wider opportunity.
Rigorous Academics. Launch puts students on a path to success, with a strong scholarly foundation guiding its trajectory. Drew students craft a customized program of study to match their Launch Plan, choosing from 40+ majors and 60+ minors as well as combined-degree and pre-professional programs.
Our Bottom Line. Pair affordability with our Launch undergraduate experience and you get value. That’s because Drew builds life and career readiness built right into your education, along with a continual commitment to affordability and generous financial aid.
How Launch Happens
How can Drew do it? Guarantee that Launch puts each student on a path to success? The answer lies in the defining constructs of the Launch program itself.
Launch is:
- integrated across academic and student life and required for graduation, making its benefits universal.
- structured and continual, with targeted, required career development components across each of the four years at Drew.
- embraced by our faculty, whose teaching instills knowledge and transferable skills in the classroom setting and beyond.
- customized by and for each student via a purpose-driven Launch Plan that aligns the undergraduate experience with life and career readiness.
- fueled by career- and affinity-based mentor communities, providing a foundation for students to build networks while still in college.
- staffed by the Launchpad Team, a squad of dedicated counselors and area-specific experts who guide each student’s individual Launch journey.
- The Fiske Guide to Colleges ranks Drew as a Top 10 Best Buy school, the only N.J. school in the top 20, for the second consecutive year. Fiske also noted Drew as being among the “Best and Most Interesting” colleges and universities.
- The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings place Drew in the top 20% of schools in the U.S.
- Drew is listed among The Princeton Review’s Best 385 Colleges.
- The Princeton Review puts Drew on its Top 10 lists for both college theatre and student inclusiveness.
- Drew ranked #8 nationally among baccalaureate colleges for international student enrollment, according to the 2019 Open Doors Report of the Institute of International Education.
- Our campus, called The Forest, encompasses 168 beautiful, wooded acres and includes historic buildings, old-growth trees and an arboretum.
- There are 90+ student clubs.
- 25% of students are Ranger student–athletes, and there are 22 NCAA Division III men’s and women’s sports teams.
- Drew offers 12+ student-run club sports and a full complement of sports and fitness facilities.
- Community traditions include Move-In Day, Halloweekend, 99 Nights, FernFest, First Annual Picnic and many more.
- It’s a ten-minute walk to the train station, and the train takes you directly to Midtown Manhattan in under an hour.
- Madison is one of the safest cities in the U.S. and took the #1 spot on New Jersey Monthly’s 2019 list of Top Towns in New Jersey.
- Madison has a walkable, postcard-perfect downtown with shops and cafés, while nearby Morristown is a fun, funky small city with museums and a music scene.
- In a one-hour radius of campus are: a wildlife refuge, the Jersey Shore, the Meadowlands (where the NY Giants, NY Jets and NJ Devils play), and the world-class museums, restaurants, concert venues, sports arenas, clubs, galleries, theaters, architecture, etc., of New York City.
Learn more at drew.edu/accolades.
