Month: October 2026

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 began 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.

The University of Dayton and Sinclair Community College are just two miles away from one another, but in many ways, they are worlds apart. UD is a private Catholic university providing a four-year undergraduate experience. Sinclair, a public community college, offers the most affordable associate’s degree in the state of Ohio. And yet, when a group of educators from both institutions held a retreat to explore a partnership around character education, an infectious energy emerged. 

“It was like we fell in love with each other over three days,” said Nancy McHugh, the executive director of the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community at UD. “We went in as two separate groups and came out as one.” 

At the end of the retreat, they named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck. This eclectic group of educators are now the driving force behind an unusual partnership in higher education based on what unites them, not what sets them apart. Funded by the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) out of Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character, UD and Sinclair will now embed character instruction into curricular and co-curricular initiatives at both schools, with a particular focus on community-engaged learning. At the heart of the initiative is the UD-Sinclair Academy (UDSA), one of the country’s most promising examples of a two-year/four-year transfer collaboration.

They named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck.

Using character as the bridge, the team believes the work will produce a number of positive outcomes, including expanding the work of personal formation to all students, infusing belonging into the transfer pathway between the schools, and deepening each institution’s commitment to the community. In this sense, the UD/Sinclair character education initiative promises to be a national model for how institutions of different profiles and student populations can create beneficial relationships while deepening their respective missions. 

Breaking New Ground

The initial retreat that brought the team together was part of an ECI capacity building grant meant to help institutions do the groundwork for their character education aspirations. Oftentimes, these planning stages bring into focus existing assets, and in some cases barriers, that can be addressed through a larger effort. Always, it is the people behind the initiatives who ultimately shape how the work takes root.

The UD/Sinclair partnership is led by two academics who, their colleagues say, represent the best of each institution: UD’s Nancy McHugh and Sinclair’s Myra Bozeman. McHugh is a philosopher by training, though she calls herself a “weird one,” spending as much time outside the classroom working with students in the community as she does inside it. The Fitz Center, where she is director, is one of several centers at UD that focuses on community-engaged learning — a form of experiential education in which students apply what they are learning in class to the needs of the community. 

“I’ve always tried to help students understand that the work we do internal to higher ed travels out into the world,” she said. “The skills we are learning in the humanities, in the liberal arts, have this strong external-facing component that helps us understand how to live better in the world and also develop our personal and professional lives in ways that are really important.” 

Myra Bozeman, the dean of liberal arts, communication and social sciences at Sinclair, was born and raised in Dayton. “I have a deep connection to Sinclair,” she said. “I was the first child in their day care because my mother was a student here. I have a real love for the students, and moreover, the community.” 

Bozeman said that while most faculty at four-year colleges have an expectation about research, the expectation at Sinclair is to be out doing work in the community. This mirrored UD’s Catholic Marianist mission, advanced by its current president, Eric Spina, who in 2017 declared UD the “university of the common good.”

A year earlier, Spina worked closely with Sinclair’s president Steven Johnson to create the UDSA, an affordable pathway for transfer students from Sinclair to UD. USDA students are representative of Sinclair’s population: Most are Pell-eligible, first generation, and/or students of color. For their first two years, USDA students pay Sinclair tuition (around $5,500 annually) rather than UD tuition (around $50,000), while gaining full access to UD’s campus experience and student organizations, as well as co-curricular opportunities at both institutions. When Sinclair students transfer to UD after receiving their associate’s degree, they get a deep discount on tuition. 

Realizing the program’s full potential involves educators from both schools continuing to learn about each other and reflecting on the perceptions they bring to the work. Fortunately, the trust and candor the dream team members built has enabled them to address issues head on. 

“UD is a fantastic institution, but they haven’t, in the past, been the most welcoming platform for students of color,” Bozeman said. “Many Blacks just didn’t feel like they belonged on that campus. I personally believed UD has wanted to welcome our students, but perhaps they didn’t understand how to do it. And now we can help figure that out.” 

UD’s 2024 Culturally Engaging Campus Environments survey revealed that UDSA students experience lower community connection and sense of belonging compared to traditional four-year UD students. However, UDSA students do experience strong educator support at UD and find they have abundant opportunities for positive regional contribution. The dream team sees this as an opportunity for growth and collaboration across institutions, with character-education tied to community-engaged learning as a vehicle to increase the sense of belonging for students in both their curricular and co-curricular lives. 

For McHugh, the belonging gap for the UDSA students sparked an “aha moment” that would lead to a larger inter-institutional effort funded by an ECI institutional impact grant of a little under a million dollars. She told the team, “Let’s use community-engaged learning as a vehicle for character education and then use that to create a common language for character for both institutions to drive forward this sense of belonging for all students.” 

Understanding and communicating what that looks like is an ongoing conversation, both within regular meetings of the dream team and at brainstorming sessions called “charettes.” The project materials describe character as a set of dispositions, or virtuous habits, that shape how we think, feel, and act. The overlay of community-engaged learning means that these habits are shaped by community participation and geared toward the benefit of the community. 

“For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller.”

While the benefits of experiential learning are well established, leaders advocate that when implemented with intentional attention to character education, these benefits compound, as student gain not just knowledge and skills but the moral and epistemic dispositions to use them wisely in service to others. In creating a common language and commitment to these principles, the project is guided by nine virtues: joyfulness, curiosity, resilience, hope, integrity, mindfulness, empathy, justice, and community belonging. 

While the foundation of the initiative is rather philosophical, the proposed plan is a tangible list of specific initiatives with deliverables, including work within the community-facing centers and in co-curricular activities for students on both campuses. Much of the energy and resources are pointed inside the classroom. Among the project’s goals are to strengthen cross-institutional collaboration and to empower educators at both institutions to implement character education into their courses. This is happening on many levels, starting with faculty who now teach or guest lecture on both campuses, with many planning to infuse character into their coursework. 

A newly launched faculty fellows program will train 10 new faculty a year from both institutions to use a character pedagogical framework, resulting in a cohort of 70 or so over time. These will include senior character fellows who will act as mentors to other faculty members. 

To improve the UDSA experience for students, “all of Sinclair and all of UD would need to be involved,” McHugh said. “We need to know that when a UDSA student goes into a class in engineering, they will feel a sense of belonging because those educators will have the same sort of language.” Many Sinclair professors, who were unaware of even having UDSA students in their classrooms, are learning how to use a character framework to get to know them.

Dair Arnold, a professor of English at Sinclair, is now running a character pilot in her first-year composition course. While keeping with her standard syllabus, she now adds a character lens to each of her units. In the introduction to writing section, the theme is “know yourself.” Instead of one week of introductory work before the first assignment, Arnold took two weeks where she talked about what character means for students. 

The character “cheat sheet” she gives her students defines it as “who you are becoming and how we choose to act — especially when situations are difficult, uncertain or require us to think beyond ourselves.” 

Arnold said the students are embracing the revised format and feel excited to be a part of something intentional and different. “For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller, and giving them the skills so they can make informed choices that are good for them, as well as large groups of people.” 

Helping Sinclair students explore their personal growth through character education is a big part of the effort to increase belonging. “I think this project is going to enable the two-year students, and their faculty, to have opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said Katherine Rowell, a retired full faculty member at Sinclair who has moved her office down the street to UD and is now heading up faculty development and assessment on the character education initiative. 

Rowell believes the character education will help counterbalance the national narrative about the purpose of community college which has been skewed almost exclusively towards workforce development. “We need both. You can’t do workforce development without also talking about integrity and ethics and resilience,” she said. “Community college students need the opportunity to work on these things, not just students at elite liberal arts colleges.” 

The commitment UD has made to partner with Sinclair on formative education has Rowell hopeful and excited about the work ahead. “I think just the conversations — the faculty from both institutions talking about these things and making sure students are cared for — it is good to be a part of. In all my time working in community college settings, I have never had a four-year institution reach out or make any overture until now.” 

Another dream team member, Danielle Boone, reiterates the importance of character education to the regional workforce missions of both schools, particularly Sinclair. Boone is a UD staff member who runs a program called Professional and Applied Learning (PAL) that supports UDSA students. She is also an adjunct faculty member at UD and Sinclair in psychology and is building character education into these courses.

Much of her work is aimed at preparing students for jobs in the community — one of the goals within the community-engaged learning framework of the initiative. Of the UDSA graduates from 2023 to 2024, 80 percent of those who are employed, have jobs in the Dayton region. Boone sees a through line from the UD/Sinclair character initiative and the needs of the regional workforce. She calls the work “employer-informed character.” 

“This is about making sure our students show up at work as whole people and have the skills they need to persist through adversity and be successful,” she said. “That to me is character. And if we are going to argue about the relevancy of higher education than this is what we’ve got to do.” 

Given UD and Sinclair’s shared commitment to personal growth and community, the dream team’s character initiative may well come full circle, reinforcing what the two institutions had always had in common, yet might not have known. Bozeman recalled an epiphany she had early on in the first dream team retreat: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is going to change our community. This is going to change it all.’” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.