It's called "Designing Your Life," a course that's part throwback, part foreshadowing of higher education's future.
Before Kanyi Maqubela became an investment partner at the
Collaborative Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on
social enterprises, he was a typical Stanford student in need of career
guidance. He was working with startups, studying philosophy, dating
someone special—and feeling overwhelmed.
Enter "Designing Your Life," a new and wildly popular course for
Stanford juniors and seniors that is grounded in design thinking
concepts and techniques. The course’s lessons gave him the perspective
he needed to navigate decisions about life and work post graduation.
"It really helped me understand what the concept of vocation was," he
says. "I had thought of it either as a narrowly religious concept or
for a specific job. But it’s this feeling that I have true agency over
my work, because I know what I stand for and I have tools to fix the
things that I encounter in my life."
He felt liberated, he says, by how the course positioned the idea of
career success: "Take your work personally, but it’s not your person."
At the time, "Designing Your Life" was still an experiment,
spearheaded by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design
program, and Dave Evans, who led the design of Apple's first mouse and
co-founded Electronic Arts before embarking on a second career in the
classroom. They launched the course in spring 2010.
"It took off in just about a heartbeat," says Evans, who oversees
instruction with help from guest lecturers and a small army of student
volunteers, who lead discussion groups. Today, 17% of seniors enroll in
"Designing Your Life," and many more vie for the limited seats in each
section. "We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to
their friends who weren’t enrolled," he says.
Evans divides the course into two parts: first, he says, "We reframe
the problem. That’s where dysfunctional beliefs get blown-up. Then we
give them a set of tools and ideas to take steps to start building the
way forward." Each course section convenes for one quarter, two hours
per week.
Here's what they learn: gratitude; generosity; self-awareness;
adaptability. All reinforced by design thinking-based tools, from a
daily gratitude journal to a deck of cards featuring problem-solving
techniques. In lieu of a final exam—the class is pass/fail—students
present three radically different five-year plans to their peers. Alumni
say they still refer back their "odyssey plans"—a term that Evans
coined—and revise them as their lives and careers progress.
For years, students have resisted this kind of overlap between
university-sponsored programs and their private lives. After the Civil
War, mandatory chapel disappeared, academics rather than ministers
became university presidents, and courses like "Evidences of
Christianity" vanished from the required curriculum.
"Universities didn’t think they would necessarily be abandoning the
moral aspects of students’ education," says Julie Reuben, a Harvard
professor who studies the history of American higher education.
"Instead, they believed that freely chosen activities were more powerful
than externally forced activities."
But, to the chagrin of university leaders, many students abandoned
religion and instead embraced extracurricular outlets like athletics and
fraternities, which in their own way took on the function of
character-formation. In the mid-20th century, the university’s role as
authority figure became even more problematic and contested, as
protesters dismantled the Ivory Tower’s paternalistic structures and
paved the way for increasingly diverse and inclusive institutions. The
success of "Designing Your Life" suggests that students may be ready to
revisit that earlier university model, with conditions—conditions that
design thinking is perhaps well-suited to address.
"In the early academy it was all about moral formation. These days
you can’t do that," Burnett says. "Design doesn’t speak to ethics and
spirituality and all those things, but they work within its frameworks.
Our only bias is, hey, we can make the future better."
The goal of "Designing Your Life," he says, is to change higher
education—not by returning to religion, but by reintroducing methods of
"forming you into the person that will go out into the world, effect
change, and be a leader."
That message resonates with Stanford students. They are filled with a
sense of purpose and determined to solve the world's problems—but
ill-equipped, in our secular society, to make sense of what they value.
What's more, her parents are more supportive than they were before;
Wright presented her odyssey plan to them, too. "My family is all from
one area," she says. "Ultimately, after graduation, I plan on not being
around. I think I was able to convey to my parents more effectively why I
want to travel and what I want to get out of it."
As Burnett sees it, the course is also a neat fit for the mercurial
economy that students are graduating into. "The thing that’s true about
design problems is that you don’t know what the solution is going to
look like. You don’t start with the problem; you start with people," he
says. "You create a point of view about what a better consumer
experience would be. Then you prototype, you test, and you constantly
change your point of view. That’s perfect for your 'Designing Your
Life.' You can’t know the future, but you can know what’s available and
you can prototype different versions of the you that you might become."
That approach stands in contrast to the habit of "accumulating
accolades" that Burnett sees many students exhibiting at Stanford.
Indeed, pressure to succeed is very much top of mind for Stanford
students like Nick Xu, an architecture major from Sydney, Australia. He
pauses for a moment from his Aussie-accented praise of Evans's course
("freaking awesome!") to reflect in a more serious way on the campus
climate he and his peers inhabit. "Here, you’ve got to be viewed as
successful," he says. "There's a very empty pursuit of money—money’s a
big part of it—but also fame and perception, how other people view you."
"Duck syndrome" is a common malady: "You look like you’re floating on
the surface, but you’re paddling furiously underneath."
"I was a total duck," he adds. "I really needed this class."
Stanford administrators have taken notice of reactions like Xu’s.
"It’s a model, as an administrator, that is not cheap, because it’s
hands-on and requires small groups," says Harry Elam, vice provost of
undergraduate education. Nonetheless, he has asked Evans to develop a
pared-down version of "Designing Your Life" for freshmen and sophomores
as a complement to their academic advising. The resulting program,
"Designing Your Stanford," launched with its first cohort last fall.
Elam views both offerings as an answer to the prominent skeptics, like Peter Thiel,
who question whether the traditional four-year college experience is
worth the investment. "It’s very important that we reclaim what it means
to get a liberal arts education," he says. "College is not just a means
to an end, but an end in itself."
Buttressing that philosophy has taken on new urgency as "college"
migrates online; in 2013, over 5 million U.S. college students, out of
roughly 20 million, enrolled in at least one web-based course, according to the Babson Survey Research Group.
American universities—today an unwieldy mix of liberal arts,
professional training, and research—may have to focus in order to
compete, education writer Kevin Carey argues in his new book, The End Of College.
At a recent New America Foundation event, he pointed to the University
of Minnesota-Rochester, located near the Mayo Clinic, as emblematic of
the new model; the school offers only two majors, health sciences and
health sciences administration, resulting in a cost structure that is is
"a million times better than that of a typical second-tier
institution."
Stanford is very much a first-tier institution. Last year, it
admitted just 5.7% of the students who applied. But as a residential
college, it’s not immune from the vagaries of the shifting digital
landscape.
"As online education becomes more appealing, residential colleges are
thinking, what are the things you can only do face to face?" Reuben
says. "Colleges never dropped the ‘we’re about the whole person, we’re
about character’ from their rhetoric. In reality, it’s been easy for
them to talk about that but do academic content and skills. That’s what
they spend big resources on, and that’s how they select students."
On the surface, it’s hard to object to these initiatives, or to the
very idea of designing your life. "We’re an invitation to have more and
different ideas," Evans says. "There’s more than one person running
around in you, and they’re all you. Creating multiple solutions empowers
the one you ultimately decide on." He views the course as a
continuation of Thomas Jefferson’s description of the University of
Virginia as a "learning community to form citizen leaders."
But in my conversations with "DYL" students, both past and present, I
was sometimes struck by how exhausting their pursuit of "flow,"
"leadership," and "positivity" had the potential to become. It was as if
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism had been re-staged in Palo Alto, California, circa 2015. Self-improvement, after all, can serve as a stand-in for salvation.
One phrase in particular—"being intentional"—was what caught my ear.
I'd only ever heard it in church, where pastors often talk about
"intentionality" in prayer, giving, or other behaviors.
"I’m now thinking about how to live my life with an intentionality
that I didn’t have before. It’s in my hands," Wright, the aspiring Peace
Corps volunteer/American Ninja Warrior, told me.
I asked Nadia Mufti, a social entrepreneur who graduated from Stanford
in 2011, what the phrase meant to her, after she used it several times.
In all of her odyssey plans, she says, there was one common theme: "I
wanted to take care of myself."
She went on to describe how she has followed through on that goal:
each morning she meditates for 30 minutes; she eats lots of green
smoothies and vegetables; she has gone gluten-free. "I’ve done
experiments on my body, and that’s when I feel best." She tries to work
out everyday, rotating between swimming, running, and yoga. She invests
in relationships. "I have been really intentional in cultivating and
maintaining close friendships, even when I’m really stressed." She tries
to read at least a book a month. "At one point, this is kind of taking
it to an extreme, but I had this chart on my wall with habits that I
wanted to create. Did you eat healthy today? Did you not drink today?
Did you see friends outside of work today? How do you feel, on a scale
on 1-10? I try to track if the things that I thought would make me happy
really worked, at the end of the day." She recognizes the importance of
gratitude. "My boyfriend and I, before we go to bed, say at least three
things that we’re grateful for." For her 25th birthday, she spent 25
days in the service of friends and family. It went so well, she extended
the project to 50 days. "I’d read a lot about servant leadership," she
says. "I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that if I
hadn’t taken the ‘Designing Your Life’ course."
Her example left me feeling both inadequate and exhausted by
association. I began mentally calculating whether I had time after work
to bring a green smoothie to a friend I hadn’t seen in
months—relationships, service, and nutrients, all accomplished in one
efficient calendar block. Maybe I could bike there, for some added
exercise.
But at the same time, it was hard to argue with Mufti’s choices. In
her case, "Designing Your Life" had truly fulfilled its mission: she was
happy, healthy, and making the world a better place.
Recently Mufti has been back on campus, helping pilot "Designing Your
Stanford." Nearby, at the Graduate School of Business, another
"Designing Your Life"-based pilot is also underway.
Carly Janson, a director in the business school's career management
center, has been been adapting the course for incoming students. "It’s
not always easy to connect the dots between the legacy you want to leave
on the world and the career decisions you need to make today," she
says. Design thinking, values-based but practical, provides a bridge.
"Career services, as a field, could totally change the way that we
think about careers by applying design thinking," she says. Students
today are doing "careers design, plural," and schools need to catch up
to that reality.
The course’s success stories have started to attract attention
outside of Stanford's lush campus, and now plans to expand are in the
works. Evans and Burnett are raising funds from Stanford donors,
expanding their team, talking with other universities, and even working
with Google to develop a new version of the program for working
professionals. A book based on the course is due to hit shelves next
spring.
Finding a way to replicate the avuncular Evans, the charismatic heart
of the course, will be one of their primary challenges. Students gush
about his intelligence and warmth. "An amazing, amazing, amazing human,"
says one. "He is just the man," says another.
"We started this as a thing on the side, and now we’ve got some stuff
we have to build," says Evans. But at the core, the program remains the
same: "We invite people to live intentionally, in a generative,
thoughtful way, and we give them a bunch of tools." What happens next is
up to the students.
Worldview Stanford's blended online and on-campus course "The Science of Decision Making" opened Feb. 23. Learn more at: http://stanford.io/1uCPMCP
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