Outdoor Leadership & Education Major

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About the Major

The outdoor leadership and education (OLE) major is designed to provide the knowledge and skills for individuals to design, facilitate, analyze and assess a variety of programming. OLE students develop transferable skills that apply to formal and informal settings, including national parks, natural science centers or museums, corporate training and consulting, environmental policy organizations, and outdoor education outfitters.

Jobs in Outdoor Leadership & Education

Experiential educator
K-12 educator
Outdoor education program director
Environmental policy advocate
Corporate trainer or consultant

Past Elon Outdoor Leadership & Education Internships

Pura Vida Adventures
Haw River Canoe and Kayak
Inside Out Inc.
The Experiential School of Greensboro
Circolo Nautico Arcobaleno Sailing School in Italy

Related Majors

Hands-on Elon experiences ‘paved the way’ for a career in outdoor leadership and education

Genevieve stands in a stunning locations with trees, mountains and beautiful sky behind her.

Burned out from high school and in need of a hard reset, Genevieve Emerson took a gap year exploring Mexico for three months through the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). It wasn’t that she was super into the outdoors — in fact, she would only begrudgingly join her family on hikes growing up in Colorado — but she just needed to get away.

Little did she know that the experience would be the first step in changing the trajectory of her career.

“That made me fall in love with the outdoors,” Emerson said of the backpacking, sea kayaking and sailing she did through NOLS.

When it was finally time to attend Elon University in the fall of 2019, Emerson took advantage of Elon’s optional pre-orientation program Adventures in Leadership, which had her backpacking through Pisgah National Forest for three nights before starting college. She loved it, just as she had the NOLS wilderness program. And it was just another sign that maybe her plan to major in dance science wasn’t going to be the right move.

With each experience it became even more clear that I would love to keep leading trips for people. I really enjoy it. I think it’s so fulfilling being able to introduce people who haven’t been in a situation like that to a place and have them filled with awe.

The third sign? She took a course on human physiology during her freshman year — and quickly realized she did not like the “science” part of dance science. So when it came time to choose her classes for sophomore year, she signed up for Introduction to Adventure-Based Learning, now called Outdoor Leadership and Education, or OLE.

“When I started learning more about OLE as a major and how to use the outdoors as a vehicle to get people to learn and to get people to appreciate the outdoors, I was like, I could easily get behind this,” said Emerson, who graduated from Elon in 2023 with a double major in outdoor leadership and education and strategic communications.

Emerson’s college experience was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but she still managed to embrace the opportunities Elon provided to get hands-on OLE training once they were back on campus. She worked for two programs offered through Campus Recreation and Wellness: the pre-orientation Adventures in Leadership program as well as Elon Outdoors, which offers adventure-based learning to students year-round. And she took advantage of Elon’s study abroad program by taking a Critically Engaged Ecotourism class in New Zealand during a January term.

Those experiences “absolutely paved the way,” she said. “With each experience it became even more clear that I would love to keep leading trips for people. I really enjoy it. I think it’s so fulfilling being able to introduce people who haven’t been in a situation like that to a place and have them filled with awe.”

Even before graduating, Emerson was already using the lessons she learned at Elon. As a ski instructor at Winter Park Resort in Colorado, she found ways to keep kids stimulated and on task. And as the leader of backpacking trips, she could pull from her arsenal of knowledge in even the toughest of times.

On one strenuous backpacking trip in the North Carolina mountains solo leading a group of high school students from Tampa, Florida, Emerson had just dropped the group off at a swimming hole to relax when she encountered a situation back at camp. A teen and a teacher who had lingered behind approached her as she was walking toward camp and told her they had seen a bear there.

“I went over to get my bear spray, but my bag was no longer there — the bear had drug it into the woods,” Emerson said. “We learned a lot about how to do crisis management in my OLE classes, and one of the biggest things is staying calm, and luckily the bear spray had fallen out of my backpack, so I had a way to defend myself. We ended up getting the kids back to camp, had them pack everything up and move to a different camp, and they said, ‘If we had been in that situation with anybody else, we would have been so scared, but you handled it well and you had a good grasp on the situation.’”

In her Elon classes, Emerson had been told various stories about how crises happen and how the leaders either make or break the situation.

“That was one of my more poignant lessons,” she said of the bear encounter.

It wouldn’t be her last poignant lesson. The summer after she graduated, on her way to her new job in Maine to work for an adventure program, she was involved in a serious car accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury and broken femur.

Months of rehab followed, and Emerson participated in adaptive recreation with different companies in Colorado. She went on a three-night retreat up to Crested Butte with Adaptive Sports Center and did monthly climbing excursions with Adaptive Adventures. The experiences got her thinking about those people for whom the outdoors isn’t always easy to navigate. Through adaptive outdoor recreation, they — and she — were given the chance.

“That’s been really cool to see how they work with people with different physical and mental difficulties and are still able to get them engaged and up on the rock wall,” Emerson said. “We had … one woman who had suffered from a stroke, so she had issues holding things with one of her hands, and they had adaptive paddles. It was really, really cool to see how the outdoor industry has adapted to fit the needs of people who can’t recreate the same way as everyone else.”

Emerson is now considering a graduate program in adaptive outdoor recreation at the University of New Hampshire.

In the meantime, she continues to work at Winter Park in a behind-the-scenes role helping kids who need encouragement, and once she is cleared from her head injury, she will get back on the slopes as an instructor. She also plans to do other seasonal work, including the job in Maine that was derailed in May 2023. She is set to work for them in the summer of 2024.

When Emerson applied to Elon back in 2017, before her gap year, she did so only because of its dance science program. She considers herself fortunate that when that major fell through, she was at a university that offered so many opportunities in outdoor leadership and education — and had professors who encouraged her leadership talent.

“I think it worked out really perfectly,” she said.

Did You Know?

Students can select from four different concentrations in the major: Environmental; Experiential Training and Consulting; Intra/Interpersonal; or Learning and Leadership. Each concentration offers an interdisciplinary curriculum, hands-on experience and other opportunities designed to prepare students for a variety of positions post-graduation.
The outdoor leadership and education major uses principles and pedagogies of experiential education to design and facilitate individual, group and community development. Outdoor experiential education focuses on intellectual growth, emotional development, well-being and agency. This major prepares graduates with the skills and knowledge necessary to develop and operate socially just, equitable and inclusive programming.
Students have the opportunity to graduate with a multitude of relevant work experience, certifications and skills on their resumes. The major is interdisciplinary in nature with options including courses in both the liberal arts and professional schools.