Brussels Summer Program (BSSP) will be a five-week program, 10 July – 11 August 2017. The BSSP is an innovative approach to introducing students to the European Union and the political process thereof. Its various components (seminar, colloquium, visits to institutions, policy memo recommendation) offer students a varied but coherent lens into the intricacies of the EU and its institutions, policy-making processes, and core policy issues. The program combines academic expertise with deep, on-the-ground knowledge of the EU apparatus and allows students to immerse themselves in the main hubs of EU politics.It will be comprised of an orientation week whereby students will visit major EU institutions - the European Parliament, the Council of the EU, the EU Commission and a field trip to the European Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, and to the European Investment Bank. The program also includes a visit to the US Mission to the EU and orientation walking tours of both Luxembourg City and Brussels. Academic work includes a main seminar and a colloquium that are together designed to give students an in-depth understanding on how the EU functions from academic and practitioner perspectives. BSSP will explore how the EU was formed, how it works as a political and economic union, and how it addresses crisis-related subjects: Euro/sovereign debt crisis, Arab Spring, Ukraine-Russia, Syria, refugees, the Schengen dilemma, and the Transatlantic free trade zone/TTIP. The program will also offer a module in which students write a policy recommendation memo based on individual research of a policy topic and an interview of at least one EU official.By integrating the academic and practitioner experiences for these students, the program promises to generate a versatile, multidimensional understanding that will become ingrained in the lexicon of their professional endeavors. Thus, the participants become the ripple effects for the impact of the program.