Zicklin Undergrads Help Refugees While Gaining Job Skills

Professor Donna Gitter of the Zicklin School of Business Department of Law teaches a course for Baruch undergraduates in the Macaulay Honors program called “The Peopling of New York,” in which she has partnered with nonprofit organizations to create experiential learning opportunities for her students.

Law Professor Donna Gitter

A case in point was a recent partnership with HIAS, a nonprofit that helps rescue and resettle refugees who have fled persecution in their home countries. Gitter’s students prepared “country condition reports” to support asylum seekers represented by pro bono attorneys working with HIAS.

The Macaulay students, 70 percent of whom were in the Zicklin School, worked on cases for refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Ethiopia, who were seeking asylum based on persecution because of their gender, sexual orientation, political opinions, or attempts to avoid involvement in gang violence. Students could choose the country and the issue they wanted to focus on.

Students learned how to research the conditions in each asylee’s country of origin by reading U.S. State Department country reports, reports by nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and media reports from news organizations such as CNN or the BBC. They had to locate and excerpt the language in these reports that most strongly supported the legal claim of persecution.

In addition, students learned the mechanics of proper citation, which was particularly challenging given the need for economy of language. Students needed to excerpt and quote the most relevant portions of the reports, while leaving out extraneous language. There was also a technology component; students learned to search documents electronically for relevant keywords, create PDFs of source documents, and attach the PDFs to the final report, with the relevant language highlighted.

A lot of classroom discussion revolved around legal criteria and finding supportive language. “The country could have other problems, like food shortages or ethnic conflict, but you can’t argue, ‘This country is troubled, so we should let this person in,’ because that’s not how U.S. immigration law works,” Gitter explains. “They have to build a case that shows the asylee’s government is not protecting them.”

In the end, the report produced was like an assignment a junior employee might be asked to create in the workplace. “It’s very much like work I was asked to do as a junior lawyer,” Gitter notes.

HIAS was pleased with the results. “Your students did exactly as we asked,” a HIAS staff attorney told Gitter in an email. “The research was on point and the final product very well done.”

Gitter says she likes designing experiential learning projects because they’re more meaningful: “Students work on them not just to get a good grade, but to learn something useful and also have an impact on the community.”

Nicholas Thomas  (BBA, ’25)

Nicholas Thomas (BBA, ’25), a student who worked on a report for a Guatemalan woman facing gender-based violence, says he enjoyed the experience and that it improved his research skills “and my ability to pull out the important parts of a governmental paper and use them to my advantage.”

“It felt good to know that I was working on a final project that would actually have an impact on society, as opposed to a traditional argumentative paper,” Nicholas adds.

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