In some ways, this year’s opening days at the College of Charleston might have resembled those of the last 20—or even the last 200. At the 13th oldest college in the country, this fall's convocation drew the perennial throng of new students who mingled with nervous excitement under the willowy live oak trees on the historic Cistern Yard.  

But this time, there was a notable addition. All around, students held, or waved, rally towels of different colors, printed with one of five encouragements: “Be Curious,” “Radically Collaborate,” “Take Action,” “Reframe,” and “Be Mindful.” 

These weren’t just typical words of wisdom for launching the year, or a college career. They are the core mindsets of Life Design, a life coaching model that CofC has decided to implement university-wide with a focus on first-year students. Over the last six years, Life Design’s expanding influence on campus has highlighted its potential to fortify students’ self-efficacy and optimism and, ideally, better position them for personal and professional success. Now leadership is on a mission to center these concepts in the student experience, introducing them early and often.   

Life Design, in essence, offers students a framework to plot multiple alternate futures for themselves and then encourages them to explore those options. The approach originated with two Stanford engineers who decided to apply their field’s design principles to regular life planning. For students, they asked, what would it look like to consider not one but three different majors, or extracurricular focuses, or career paths? Where would they take you, and would you be satisfied with each?

Kristen McMullen, the executive director of student success at CofC’s School of Business Student Success Center, was among the university’s first to embrace the practice. Her journey took off in 2019 when, along with two colleagues, she flew out to Stanford for a Life Design training program. Over four days, they were immersed in the methodology and prepared to implement the work on their campus. Come the new academic year, they launched a one-credit Life Design course that drew about two dozen underclassmen in the fall and a similar cohort of upperclassmen in the spring. 

As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short.

An assessment of this first Life Design experiment affirmed McMullen’s budding faith in the practice. Compared to control groups, students in both her classes demonstrated an improved sense of hope for the future, greater self-efficacy, and reduced career anxiety. Anecdotally, McMullen said, she could sense the change in her students. As they mapped their different life paths, they seemed freed from the pressure of fulfilling a single destiny and the fear of falling short. “They were actually starting to believe that they could take control of their lives,” she said. “They could make decisions, it was in their hands, and they just felt better about themselves.” 

Over subsequent years, McMullen extended Life Design to new corners of campus, and others took notice. There were coaching sessions for individuals and then small groups of students, and the number of other staff trained to be coaches and classes featuring the content grew. Then, around two years ago, CoC President Andrew Hsu issued a directive for all students to receive some kind of life coaching. The provost approached McMullen about whether Life Design might be the way to go about it. “Do you think we could do this college-wide?" she remembered being asked. "That's my dream,” she replied. 

Today McMullen finds herself updating a document she’s titled “My Ecosystem,” which charts all the different people and areas on campus where Life Design has made its way so far. The goal, she said, is to reach “every single department, office—everywhere we can.”  

Design Your Charleston

It was still fairly early in McMullen’s Life Design efforts when she started teaching an elective first-year seminar pulling in some of the key concepts. She was particularly impressed by just how far these very young students were able to progress in a short amount of time.

“I get goosebumps,” she said, describing how their final presentations would reflect their transformation into organized, forward-thinking, open-minded college students. They seemed to mature so quickly and fully, she added, that she would find herself thinking of them as graduating seniors, rather than rising sophomores. 

When she got the presidential green light to expand Life Design, McMullen set her sights on the First Year Experience program. As of this fall, she and Jessica Zuber, the senior director of student success and engaged learning, have launched what is perhaps the school’s most prominent Life Design effort yet: FYSS 101 Design Your Charleston, a weekly, required course for first-years combining an introduction to student life and resources with Life Design content. There are currently more than 100 sections of the class in progress, reaching a total of around 2,700 students, nearly the entire grade.

Every week, the students in Design Your Charleston receive information and complete exercises pertaining to different facets of college life. Week two on “Design Your Support System,” for example, provided an overview of various support offerings and tasked students with mapping out which they “would actually use,” according to the syllabus. Other weeks have homed in on “Design Your Community” or “Design Your Academic Path,” requiring more detailed plotting of events to attend, organizations to try out, fields of study that seem interesting, or advising questions to ask. Those five mindsets from the convocation towels —“Be Curious,” “Radically Collaborate,” etc.— are integrated continuously to give students a common language for navigating the first year, and beyond.

Another central element of Design Your Charleston is that it’s peer-facilitated. While McMullen and Zuber create the course lesson plans and PowerPoint slides for each week, older students bring the content to life in the classroom. “Not only are we growing professionals for the workforce past graduation, but also the students that they're working with are receiving information from a peer,” Zuber said. “We find that students generally receive that information better than they do from adults just telling them what to do all the time.”

McMullen believes this information really can transform the student experience. “Design Your Charleston is to intentionally design the years—whether it's three, four, five—that you're at the college so that you're getting every little thing out of the experience that you possibly can,” she said. She likes to think about the course as building a parachute for students made up of all the experiences and knowledge gained along the way. So by the time they’re jumping out of the college plane, dropping down into the real world feels like floating, rather than crashing. “This is great. I can see the view,” she hopes they are able to say. “I know where I want to go.”

A New Generation

Christopher Korey, the associate provost for student success at CofC, doesn’t subscribe to generational stereotyping. When he looks at his own children, for one, he doesn’t find the supposed Gen Z mold, which seems almost synonymous these days with some combination of fearfulness and fragility.

But Korey is willing to note that today’s college students, like many of all ages, appear to struggle with the task of taking the first step—putting themselves out there, trying something new, and risking failure in the process.

It was this recognition, in part, that Korey said inspired the request for universal student coaching in the first place. The high-level strategic vision, which Life Design helps deliver on, is for CofC to provide a truly holistic style of education: advising that goes beyond academics to help students grow as human beings, career preparation that goes beyond landing students jobs to developing their understanding of what they want to do and the skills they already have to help them succeed.

The CofC administration is currently eyeing an advancement campaign, of which one priority is boosting the university’s national prominence. Striving to become a leader in the student support and development space seems like a promising approach. “We'll learn things that we can bring to a national audience about [how this work fits] into thinking more broadly about supporting students and this generation of students,” Korey said. 

Should its steady course of Life Design expansion continue, CofC just might become as famous for its work on student wellbeing as it is for its centuries-old oaks.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.