Colleges and universities are integrating life design into the student experience to improve student well-being, academic pursuits and future planning beyond graduation. Life design, which originates from the 2016 book Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, uses six design thinking principles to help guide individuals as they navigate change and transition, ultimately helping them find meaning and purpose.
In this episode of Voices of Student Success, Adrienne Ausdenmoore, assistant vice president and executive director of the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design at Bowling Green State University, shares how the university is implementing campuswide changes to integrate life design into the student experience.
Later, hear from Stanford University’s James Tarbox, assistant vice provost and executive director of career education, who shares how life design is essential in career services.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: Bowling Green [State University] has been doing a lot of great work around life design, and some of this [is] career preparation to help students not just think about their first job out of college, but overall vocational purpose and mission beyond that. And I wonder if you can just talk about how that relates to the student success world, and where you really see that intersection of career thinking, but also how higher ed plays a role in that.
Adrienne Ausdenmoore, assistant vice president and executive director of the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design at Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University
Adrienne Ausdenmoore: As you and many of our audience members know, sometimes there’s that tendency to not really be thinking about career until the end of a college journey, or maybe from the student perspective, they’re not thinking about it.
But I think we’re also seeing that our students are looking at the value proposition of higher education … So how are we, as a whole industry, really leveraging that value proposition to our students from, absolutely a student success model, as well as what that’s going to look like for you after your college experience?
Here at BGSU, we are part of a division of student engagement and success and are incredibly fortunate to have two endowed centers as part of our life design ecosystem. So the Radbill Center—which I oversee—is really focusing on, how do we support students in their college experience? And thinking about, how they want to shape that college experience towards their career and life goals?
And then in tandem, we work really closely with our Kuhlin Hub for Career Design and Connections, which is working more directly with students on internships, co-ops, résumé readiness, career design, coaching, professional connections, corporate engagement—all of those pieces of it that we know really work, obviously together, but in a lot of institutions, traditionally, those have been two very separate worlds.
Inside Higher Ed: When it comes to the student life cycle, how do they get integrated into the center? Where is their first touch point with you and the work you’re doing?
Ausdenmoore: We start talking about life design even in our early admissions materials, really emphasizing the idea that if you come to BGSU, we want you to be career and life ready, and we want to provide that holistic experience to you as a student. That’s sort of where it starts.
Then at our orientation, we actually do a presentation for all of our incoming students called Designing Your BGSU Experience. It starts to introduce the idea of how they can shape their college experience, how they can be empowered with the skills to adapt and adjust along the way. But then we also use that presentation to introduce the idea of starting to design your future career … and what that might look like. We’re really fortunate that it even starts then.
Then, as an institution, we’ve committed to working towards 100 percent of our incoming students having some sort of formal introduction to life design. And so this fall, 75 percent of our incoming cohort has been part of either a course that is holistically focused on life design, or has it … integrated into an existing course in some way, and we’re continuing to work towards 100 percent. We believe very strongly that those first-year students, that if we can help introduce them to some of the mindsets of life design and the methodologies of design thinking, that then they can use those tools in lots of different ways throughout their college experience.
Inside Higher Ed: When you’re explaining life design to an incoming student, do they get the idea right away? When I first heard the term, I was like, “What the heck does this mean?” I think design thinking is a little more common to people, but what does that conversation look like?
Ausdenmoore: It depends on the audience a little bit.
When we talk about life design, sometimes folks will hear that and say, “Wait, are you asking me to have my entire life design already figured out?” So one of our first myth busters is, “No, we’re not.” What it really is about is empowering you, as the student, with the tools and the resources to navigate the journey, to adjust and adapt along the way. So that’s one piece of it.
Sometimes, when folks are familiar with design thinking, then we’re able to say, “OK, that’s a creative problem-solving framework, and when you apply it to yourself, that’s life design, which is being implemented in lots of different universities and ways around the world.”
And then life design at BGSU is really specifically focused around five areas. So how are we supporting our students in maximizing their academic experience, prioritizing their well-being, fostering and making lots of connections both on campus and beyond, getting that jump start on their career, and then doing all of that with a sense of purpose. Usually when we’re explaining life design, we’re doing it through those five areas, which we treat as our dashboard, our life design dashboard here.
I want to emphasize that purpose part at the end, because that really ties to our student success model here at BGSU, which is: How do we help our students be intentional about their college experience? It doesn’t mean you have it all figured out. It doesn’t mean you have a crystal ball into the future and know exactly where you want to be in five or 10 or 15 years, but it does mean that you’ve got some sense of your personal values, goals, what’s important to you in college and beyond, and how do you then leverage that as you shape your experience here?
Inside Higher Ed: I love that, because I think especially today’s young people feel a little uncertain and sometimes overwhelmed. I know there’s been a lot of research around feeling climate anxiety or like the world’s falling apart. And I think that sense of purpose can be hard [to find], especially when it comes to putting yourself in a box with a major or picking a discipline that you want to study. I wonder if you can speak to how that dimension can help students feel like they’re able to make changes and grow and sort of find new ideas of themselves as they’re going through higher ed.
Ausdenmoore: We use three student archetypes, or examples, a lot of times in our conversations.
So we have our students who are coming into college undecided, unsure. We have a deciding student program here that’s part of our life design program. And so, how can we be really intentional with those students in working through the design thinking process and utilizing the life design mindsets to help them establish the path that’s right for them?
We also talk about students who have a path but have other curiosities or interests, and so, how can you use, again, those same tools in the toolbox to think about, how can you weave in some of those other curiosities and interests into your future career? Into an internship placement, into even the courses you take here on campus or the organizations you get involved in?
And then also, if you’re a student who’s very driven, who has established a really clear path, I think life design is a really great tool to help you maximize the opportunities that are available to you in college. There are so many resources on the college campus that you can leverage. And so how do we utilize that, but also across all three of those areas?
I think it’s most important, and we hear this from our students, that they’re learning those adaptability skills. That ability to reframe, to problem-solve, to be curious but also to take action. And those things can feel like buzzwords, but when you actually put them into practice, I think it can help any of us feel more intentional about what we’re doing in a given day, whether it’s a small goal or a really big goal.
Inside Higher Ed: I also love that well-being is one of the five factors in your dashboard, because I think higher education can focus a lot on the intellectual side of the student, and now more so their career skills and how they will transition into the workplace. But building better humans is also a goal of higher education, helping people have long-term health and happiness. And so I think that’s a really cool factor to focus on as well.
Ausdenmoore: Yes, and we’re fortunate here to have a division that’s really focused on community well-being, and so they are colleagues and partners that we work really closely with. And like you said—and I think anyone listening to this podcast is probably aware—that our students are navigating a lot from mental health space, anxiety about the world, anxiety about career, uncertainty about the future, all of those things. To me, well-being is a really essential part of that, because we know that the things happening outside of the classroom to a student—personally or in the world—are going to impact the way a student is able to show up in the classroom. So if we as a campus, as a university, as higher ed as a whole, aren’t helping to address that, then we’re really ignoring a major part of what our students are navigating as part of their college experience.
Inside Higher Ed: Absolutely, you mentioned that there’s a goal to have all of the incoming students engage in life design in some capacity. And there’s those two different paths, like, some of them are doing it in a more life design–focused setting, and others, it’s just within the curriculum. I wonder if you can talk about how that looks practically and who those partners are on the curricular side to do that.
Ausdenmoore: We have a one-credit seminar here that is our signature life design course. And so any student at BGSU can take that one-credit course. It’s taught either by our life design coaches or by some of our scholarship advisers, some of our various partners across campus that are already working with a population of students.
Then we also have some really incredible academic partners that have been working to weave it into their existing curriculum. So for example, our Schmidthorst College of Business has an Intro to Business course, and so they have integrated the life design curriculum into that course. So rather than add another credit or another course that students need to take, let’s look at what we were already teaching in Intro to Business, and how can we weave in life design.
For example, if there were already assignments around career exploration, how do we reframe that as prototyping conversations and prototyping experiences, and how students are using those assignments to think about that aspect of the life design framework?
Another example is that they do business case studies and simulations, and they use design thinking, so students then are able to see how the same framework can work for starting a business, or it can work for how they think about their own college experience.
We are very fortunate. We have multiple academic partners here. Our criminal justice program has been an early adopter. We work with all of the colleges on campus to think about how best to serve those students, whether they’re pursuing teacher education, whether they’re pursuing aviation, whether they’re pursuing business or any other one of our many, many majors here.
Inside Higher Ed: I wanted to ask, if you had to give advice or insight to another administrator who’s looking to do this kind of work on their campus, what’s a lesson that you’ve learned or a piece of advice that you would pass on?
Ausdenmoore: Before I was in this role, I was doing life design at another institution and at a much smaller scale. And so one piece of advice that I share with folks a lot is just the acknowledgment that whether you’re doing it at a small scale or a large scale, innovation in higher education is difficult. It’s a challenge.
There are lots of systems and processes that sometimes can make trying something new or implementing a new program, or meeting students’ needs in a different way, really challenging. But I think that’s where we lean on the principles of design thinking, from which life design comes in. How do we take action and keep moving forward?
So I think the advice that I would share to others is that, it’s really an incredible privilege when you have the broader buy-in of your Board of Trustees, of your administration, the way that we have had here at Bowling Green. And also, it’s OK if you’re trying something at a smaller level, because as long as you’re able to tie it to the needs of your students and to the strategic goals of your institution, I think you can still have a really incredible impact on the overall experience.
Inside Higher Ed: James, I wonder if you can help paint this picture. When we’re talking about designing your life, what does that mean practically?
James Tarbox: So at Stanford, there are many exciting opportunities to get involved with life design. You can do it through the Life Design Lab, and we actually have a partnership, if you’d like. I can tell you a little bit about that, how we work with them, and how we develop a curriculum for internships based on that. But there’s the D Lab that I mentioned, there’s the d.school, and then there are several entities on campus that offer, through curriculum and other experiences, ways to get involved in terms of design thinking, and so students are not at a loss for, in essence, getting exposed to this.
It is with career many times, but it’s also with just learning how to live a fuller life in terms of the liberal arts side of Stanford.
Inside Higher Ed: I think life design, when we think of it with the student experience, is often considered, like you mentioned, with careers, but it also speaks a lot to the value of higher education and sort of the goals of student success and student development. Where do you see life design in that intersection of the student experience and how we’re preparing them for their lives beyond graduation?
Tarbox: I think you’re pointing toward one of the really flexible qualities and really timely elements of life design. There’s something called fail forward, which is normalized.
At a place like Stanford—actually, in most of higher education—students are very concerned about getting it right the first time. And what you do with something like life design is you, in essence, allow yourself to make mistakes, and you iterate, and you move forward in prototyping.
The reason why I think that’s wonderful, not just for career, but for education, is it says, “OK, expect failure. It’s going to be part of the process.” And if you can learn from it and iterate and move forward, you’ll allow yourself to be more effective, regardless of what the process is like, if it’s applying for internships, or a fellowship or for a job following graduation. There’s a real sense in which it allows us to deal with what I think is a big element for many students, which is stress.
Inside Higher Ed: When it comes to supporting students with life design, that also implies that you and your team know what life design is and how to guide students through this process. What does that look like when it comes to educating yourselves on how to best support students in this work?
Tarbox: There’s many opportunities for our team to get involved with taking courses from other areas on campus that I’ve mentioned, which is the Design Lab and also the Design School.
The way that we work with it in particular is, we actually partner with the Design Lab and we offer what’s called a wraparound course for internship experiences.
The way that that works is we integrate two big elements into the curriculum, the career readiness competencies of NACE [the National Association of Colleges and Employers] and the design elements of life design thinking. We offer several different experiences through the courses of workshops, like, how do you find an internship? How do you invest and succeed in an internship, and what comes next? As you can tell from that very description, each one of those phases is iterative. We really want the students to understand this idea of prototyping and failing forward and really allowing themselves to design a life that is really going to pull from what motivates them and what moves them forward.
Inside Higher Ed: I like that. It’s incorporated in experiential learning, as well. I think sometimes life design can seem big, like a 10-year plan. But like you just mentioned, it can happen in the little experiences that students are integrating throughout their campus life as well.
Tarbox: Actually, at Stanford, there are several iterations of a course called Designing Your Stanford. So it takes off on Designing Your Life, the book that is so well-known, and it actually allows students, depending upon their identity, for example, to take a quarter (because we’re not a semester school), and really start to think about, who do I want to become, and how can I use the elements of design thinking and prototyping to move into that life? And I’m so glad that they had that opportunity.
Inside Higher Ed: How do you work with faculty in this life design, career development sphere?
Tarbox: Given that I’ve been at Stanford for four years, it itself is an iterative process.
One of the things that we did—and it’s going to sound funny, but I promise that it brings in design thinking in a huge way—our center offered something called the Stanford Purpose Summit. It was the first one ever. What we did was, we invited practitioners and researchers from campus to join us in looking at, in essence, how does purpose become the basis for career development across a life span? And what do different areas that are doing things like design thinking do when they work with students, and how do they integrate into that design thinking?
Now, the kind of catch of it was, we worked with the D Lab, they were one of the primary partners, and we created an experience that paralleled what you would do when you do design thinking. It really turned out well in terms of, to your point, it allowed us to start to work with faculty to really look at what’s going on with research, and how can we continue that as we move forward.
Inside Higher Ed: You mentioned the NACE career competencies earlier, and when we talk about curriculum and helping prepare students for their lives after college, sometimes calling out competencies is a challenge, or it’s finding that shared language model to make sure that everybody knows and is speaking about the experiences in the same way.
I imagine when we talk about life design, there’s a similar experience there where we need to have a common language and a common phrase so that the experiences are clear, both to the students, the practitioners, whoever. I wonder if you can talk about that?
Tarbox: What I think I hear you saying is, in essence, how do we get a foothold in those two areas? Because, as you know, I think it’s the five parts of design thinking, maybe six. Then there’s eight career readiness competencies. So you’ve got 14 things that you’ve got to take control of, as it were.
What we try to do to help people get a foothold is in our courses that we offer [is] we really say, in essence, “Here’s the overview, and why don’t you take one of these and have them be your focus?” And in our internship course, when we launched it two summers ago, what we did with the students [is we] would say, “Just take two career readiness competencies, and let’s live with those throughout the 10 weeks of the summer.” And we did the same thing with regard to the design thinking.
We had a colleague from the D Lab co-teach with us. So it was really, I can take these many elements, bring them down to two, give people a chance to be successful with them. So they can say, “Hey, you know, that was pretty easy. I want to try another one.”
Inside Higher Ed: What would you say is the biggest challenge in this work, or an area that requires the most attention, to put it in another way?
Tarbox: I love that question, because what is happening there is, you’re asking about two things I think are important when anybody engages with design thinking. The first is, many centers ask, “Well, how do we scale this thing? How do we make it something that students can, in essence, take part in?” And then there’s the other piece of it … which is, “If students don’t have an opportunity to try these on with someone who can witness them, it’s not going to be successful when it’s scaled.”
So I think what’s happening in spaces in education is larger institutions, for example, are trying to say, how do we scale it and leaving behind the how do we, in essence, engage the person as a person? Smaller institutions may be more of, let’s engage a person as a person, and we forget to scale it.
I think it’s trying to find a balance, and also asking yourself, what are the resources that you have? You’re a career center; career centers don’t tend to be very well resourced. You’re spread across a number of different commitments. And so to your point from your earlier question, how do you engage with faculty? Like, is there a way to start integrating this into a course that someone might be teaching, or to, in essence, have the faculty member come over and co-teach in terms of a workshop?
The third thing that we haven’t talked about, but I think could be a really cool concept, is, how do career centers and counseling and psychology centers work together, in essence, to use something like design thinking to bring the anxiety down around career, but that’s another show.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s something we talked a little bit about earlier, sort of the dread that students feel, and we know that … mental health concerns have skyrocketed in recent years. There was a report recently that talked about students’ dread about the world, and life design can be—not the solution to that—but a part of that process, and helping students consider how their life can keep going, and how you can fail forward and those different things. Building that emotional and mental resilience. I haven’t seen that, actually, where it’s integrated into counseling and CAPS.
Tarbox: It would be cool if it were.
And just so you know, to build on what you were saying, Ashley, it’s not just at the university, because the career development model that we use acknowledges that this is a lifetime process, and people will go through transitions. I know the college-to-career transition seems big, but there are times when in the midst of your career, you decide, “I don’t want to, in essence, be x or be y, and now I’ve got to kind of re-engage those competencies (sometimes called transferable skills). And I also have to re-engage this design process, to, in essence, say to myself, ‘I can make it through this thing, and I can come out the other side with a career path and career goals that are going to really serve me well.’”
Inside Higher Ed: It’s that idea of the lifelong learner as well, that higher education doesn’t stop once you earn the degree. It gives you the skills to keep learning and keep adapting as you grow.
Tarbox: Yeah. And as you mentioned earlier, this whole idea of transformative experiences through experiential learning, is really important, and it’s also to, in essence, normalize the idea that we take the risk to integrate into change through something like design thinking, and we come out the other end transformed. Like there’s a fuller version of ourselves that we wouldn’t have known otherwise, if we didn’t take part in things like we’re talking about, like failing forward, prototyping. This whole idea of just getting in there and trying something new and seeing how it fits with where you want to take your life.
Inside Higher Ed: I asked about challenges and resources that you need to scale this work and do it well. But I also want to know what’s the inverse, where would you give advice or insight into things that work really well, or elements of your work and your programming that have been successful?
Tarbox: I think that, when we’re in the college environment, like the university environment, we’re sending some very mixed messages to people. We’re saying, in essence, be yourself. We’re saying, in essence, take your time, but we’re also saying, hurry up. And then we’re saying, be like everybody else.
I mentioned that because one of the things that I love that we do—and I apologize, I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bragging, but I just want you know that I think we’re onto something big here—we have a group called Belonging, Access and Career Equity. And the thing that we do with that group is we really encourage students to engage their identity. What is the identity that you come into your life with, so you don’t leave it behind when you get encouraged to … be like everybody else, like there’s one right way to go into this field, or there’s one right thing to do in terms of a field.
It really is, when you are doing career and you’re doing it well at the university level, you are preparing students to like, do things like get résumés, cover letters, interviews, internships, all of that, but you’re simultaneously in intersecting that with, who am I as a person, and how do I fully honor that as I go into environments that may not experience or have people who are like me? So it really is building what I would call courage into the process of career development.
Inside Higher Ed: I think also it speaks to students who— I think about music and theater majors, because they’re less likely to use career centers because they don’t see how it’s applicable to them, like résumé [reviews] and mock interviews and things like that. It’s a very different job process. And I think that work is also applicable in this where it’s, even if you’re not in a traditional corporate field, or you’re sitting down and doing the 9-to-5 job, life design can speak to your experiences in the ways that you’re still developing yourself for career and life beyond.
Tarbox: Absolutely. It does that bridge building. It allows us to take, again, those career competencies, and we can integrate them into our process of iterative thinking and design work and allow us to normalize it.
Because you’re exactly right, Ashley, people will be at career centers and think, “I have to figure it out.” And what I always tell students and parents is you don’t have to have it figured out. Just come in and talk to us. The coaches are really outstanding in terms of using some of the very techniques from design thinking to engage students and to bring down the anxiety and say, “Well, let’s look at the potential. Like, where might you take this?”
Because that’s what design thinking does; it opens options and allows you to make choices once you’ve done it.
When we look at career centers as like a triage, you know, like in a medical environment, triage is, let’s get at the immediate thing. I think we missed the bigger picture of the life that the people are going to live. And we’re at a point in these people’s lives—people being students—where we can come in and say to them, “Let’s use things like design thinking, let’s engage career readiness competencies. Let’s think about your major in a different way if you may be thinking of it [as] major equals career—it doesn’t have to be that.”
We have that opportunity to give people the education they need to live throughout their lives and live with a lens of career that isn’t so, like, prescribed, but allows me to be the author of who I want to become, and allows me to be successful in a way that makes sense for who I am, in terms of my identity and the options that are available to me. So that’s a long way of saying really looking at career across the life and knowing that there’s a formative experience that happens at the undergraduate level.
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