Author: Mollie Ames

Designing Your Life at Dartmouth

Posted on by Mollie Ames

When many people imagine old-school college career services, they see a basement office, tucked away in some undesirable part of campus. The staff there are well-meaning but not particularly helpful. Mostly, they push resume guidebooks across their desks, offering shallow words of encouragement: “Good luck, and we hope you find your future.”

Joseph Catrino, who runs career services at Dartmouth College, knows this vision is becoming quickly outdated. As students and their families invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, they’re expecting more in dividends than best wishes for a good first job. They want, and need, to know they’re charting a path to a better life; and for that, cover letter advice and interview prep just won’t cut it, anymore.

Increasingly, career centers across the country are retooling their approach to support with the use of a more comprehensive framework, called Life Design. The (somewhat self-explanatory) idea is to help students think broadly about their interests, values, and motivations in order to plot the kind of future that feels meaningful to them. The strategy often involves trying on different types of work as one step in the larger journey towards fulfillment.

Few schools have committed as wholly to the Life Design model as Dartmouth. In less than two years, its career center has become almost unrecognizable — and not just because it opened a new location on the main quad. The operation changed names from the Center for Professional Development to the Center for Career Design (C.C.D.). In February 2025, Catrino, an experienced leader at the intersection of Life Design and career services, came on to spearhead the rehaul. He inherited start-up funding, along with a $15 million anonymous donation to finance unpaid or underpaid internships. Soon he’d helped raise enough funds to match that contribution, while doubling his staff.

The development of the C.C.D. isn’t just serving students in becoming the people they want to be; it’s serving Dartmouth in becoming the school it hopes to be viewed as. After President Sian Beilock took office in 2023, she laid out several priorities, among them increasing the lifelong value of a Dartmouth education and improving student mental health and wellbeing. As these are prime concerns for colleges nationwide, they might look to Dartmouth to see how Life Design manages to move the needle forward on both accounts.

Designing Your Life 

The story of Life Design goes back to 2007, when two Stanford professors with roots in Silicon Valley, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, discovered they were interested in tackling the same problem with the same solution. They both wanted to teach their students, restless and confused about the prospect of post-grad life, to apply the tenets of design thinking to mapping their futures. The course that emerged, Designing Your Life, became one of the university’s most popular; then came a book by the same name and, eventually, a movement.

It was 2017 by the time Catrino caught the Life Design bug. He was working at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., when the opportunity arose to attend a workshop led by Burnett and Evans, who were trying to disseminate their practices in new corners of higher ed. Appointed Trinity’s director of career development shortly afterward, Catrino was quick to infuse what he’d learned from the Stanford gurus into his new work. A few years later, he’d completely remodeled the career center into the Career and Life Design Center.

Catrino’s efforts at Trinity put him at the forefront of a new brand of college career services centered around Life Design. The first school to blaze this trail was John Hopkins, Catrino said, adding that he estimates around a dozen others have followed suit since then. Many more have incorporated some element of Life Design into the student experience, but not necessarily through the career center and rarely as its “main event.”

In February 2025, Dartmouth hired Catrino with the explicit request that he revamp career services the way he had at Trinity. Once again, he said, the systems he found when he arrived followed a largely “transactional” approach — give resume advice, help with internships (ideally), ask the proverbial question: “What do you want to do for a living?” At Dartmouth, the job was made more challenging by a dearth of resources: There were the same number of staff as at Trinity, despite serving twice the number of students. 

Catrino hit the ground running. He ensured all the Dartmouth staff received training in both Life Design and motivational coaching. That pesky, proverbial question was replaced with more constructive alternatives: “What are your interests? What motivates you? What gets you excited? What challenges you? What don’t you like to do?” Some of the most important discoveries, Catrino emphasized, come from knowing what students don’t want.

Catrino likes to describe his approach as “transformational,” guiding students to new or heightened self-understanding.

If these Life Design prompts seem better suited to therapy than career counseling, that’s precisely the point. Catrino likes to describe his approach as “transformational,” guiding students to new or heightened self-understanding. There’s not much of a difference, he added, between designing a career and designing a life. “I’d like to give you the skills for life — to navigate whatever it is, whether it’s your love life, whether it’s your job, whether it’s what hobbies you get involved with,” he said. “That’s really what we’re doing.” 

Permission to Explore

As important as the guidance of a career coach is, Life Design doesn’t start and end in conversation. The meat of the work is often experiential, as students go out and try on different jobs for size. Iterating, exploring, and maybe even failing are practically requirements.

At Dartmouth, though, exploration hasn’t historically been the dominant career culture. The culture has been definitively corporate, even to the extent that deviating can feel like forsaking a chance at true success. 

“What happens is there are students who don’t know who they are, but then they see this path of finance. It’s lucrative. ‘The companies are coming to campus to find me.’ And it seems to be easy, and they just fall into it,” Catrino said. Some end up enjoying the work. Others find themselves back in Catrino’s office a few years later, realizing they took a very wrong turn. For the latter, Catrino added, a little Life Design — some more informed decision-making — might have saved them a lot of disgruntlement.

In the spirit of Life Design, the C.C.D. is committed to shifting student perceptions of the jobs available to them and lifting up a wider variety of options. While tracks in consulting and finance may be both popular and particularly visible, Dartmouth students have been charting other paths for centuries. 

Several programs geared at promoting exploration and accessibility for other fields are now underway. Career Communities, like special interest groups, have been dedicated to different professional areas (e..g, Arts & Creative, Good & Green, Law & Policy). Each is led by a career coach and allows students to connect with like-minded peers and learn about relevant opportunities. A related initiative, called Career Treks, helps expose students to industries in the flesh. Recently, students with creative instincts traveled to New York during Fashion Week to learn about the business of fashion. Another more exploratory group toured Boston to meet with a range of local employers there.

Perhaps the C.C.D.’s most notable accomplishment to date has been the $30 million it raised to finance unpaid or underpaid internships for students hoping to try out less bankable fields. This year, the fund could allow up to 250 to 275 students to take on opportunities that might otherwise have been out of reach. As part of the deal, the recipients meet with career coaches after their experience, as well as write a final report on it, to encourage reflection in a Life Design context.

For Taha Tariq, a sophomore at Dartmouth, the internship fund led to an unlikely job in Egypt and spurred an ongoing relationship with Catrino and his staff. In the fall, Taha had personally managed to secure a unique opportunity to work for the Cairo branch of a nonprofit called Ashoka, which supports social entrepreneurship around the world. How he would afford flights, housing, and food while there presented another question entirely.

With support from the C.C.D., Taha’s plans fell into place. The three months he spent in Cairo ended up being some of the best of his life, he said. Even though the job itself wasn’t perfect, it taught him about himself. He tracked which elements he found most rewarding — working with beneficiaries in the field, interviewing social entrepreneurs — and the least — sitting at a desk, doing office grunt work. 

Interning for a non-profit showed Taha he could be happy and comfortable with a lower salary that afforded him work-life balance. He said he worries in a more corporate job he might “just forget to live.” At the same time, his apparent preference for a routine that involves varied projects, interviews, and site visits made him wonder if consulting work in the Arab world might suit him. Sometimes pragmatism should outweigh idealism, he added. 

In some ways, Taha now has more questions than answers. But the C.C.D. has equipped him with the structure to navigate that uncertainty. So really, not knowing doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, he said.

Engaging Alumni 

One tool in Catrino’s arsenal that became quickly apparent upon his arrival at Dartmouth is the elite school’s robust alumni network. This closer-than-most group of grads lead inspiring and varied careers. They also exhibit a distinct willingness — in fact, desire — to engage with current Dartmouth students and career services.

Alumni involvement is a critical piece of the larger project Catrino has set out to build. For one, he has set the precedent that the Life Design and other services he and his staff offer will be available to grads at any stage. Before his tenure, only alumni three to five years out could call back for help. But if the Life Design ethos stipulates the process never truly ends, it definitely doesn’t end a handful of years after graduation. Parents return to work after raising their kids. Layoffs throw a wrench in best-laid plans. A new dream spurs a return to academia after decades away.  

One particular career challenge as sure to pull in alumni as current students stems from the nature of today’s quickly changing workforce. “You have to learn how to be nimble. You have to be able to understand your skills. You have to understand who you are to be versatile across all this disruption that’s going to be happening,” Catrino said. Life Design, among other tools, may help workers expect the unexpected.

In addition to serving alumni, the C.C.D. envisions wielding their networks and connections for current students. So far, Catrino said, the grads have been more than obliging. “I have alums that are constantly calling and messaging, asking how they can help. Can they be a mentor? ‘Here’s a project-based internship that we’d like to offer.’” So far, 127 alumni and parents have contributed $61 million of the center’s $94 million fundraising goal. 

The ideal outcome is not necessarily — or only — that alumni boasting the most triumphant corporate careers lead the charge to give back. Enlisting the partnership of grads from a variety of different fields is a key piece of the C.C.D.’s mission to expose students to many paths. Especially for industries whose hiring pipelines are more obscure, personal knowledge and connections can make all the difference for those still looking to get a foot in the door. 

On a recent Thursday evening in Manhattan, hundreds of Dartmouth alumni of all ages came together to hear from their president, Sian Beilock. A few dozen from the younger subset, one to ten years out, arrived early. They weren’t just there to sip the peach bellinis passed by servers in white coats and catch up with old friends. They gathered in that mahogany-paneled, chandeliered library up the stairs from the main event space to hear a pitch from Catrino. He told them about the C.C.D.’s new inclusive approach to career services. He told them about his motto for working with grads like them: “Give support, get support.” 

In the audience was Caitlyn King, a member of the class of 2024. The former art history major now works in New York for an art advisor but has plans to start a master’s program at Oxford in the fall. She said her experience job hunting while at Dartmouth, prior to Catrino’s arrival, involved more guidance from professors in her department than the career center. But with continuing questions about what might come after her next academic endeavor, and again after that, she found Catrino’s offer tempting. In fact, she said, she might just talk to him about opportunities to engage that night.

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

Awakening the Lion Mind at Loyola Marymount University

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Amanda Christy was searching for something and so, it seems, were her students. As a faculty member at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she was frustrated by her students’ lack of engagement and their reliance on A.I. even for basic work like classroom discussion. She was tired of persuading them of the value of their liberal arts education when they bemoaned not being in business classes. There were days when she thought, “What are we even doing here?” 

The burnout Christy was experiencing was soon replaced with renewed energy after she participated in a faculty learning community sponsored by the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative. The initiative seeks to embed six intellectual virtues (“The Virtues of the Lion Mind”) into L.M.U.’s pedagogy and culture — helping students cultivate cognitive habits that lead to critical thinking and active learning. 

Christy designed a whole course around two of the virtues: intellectual curiosity and intellectual courage, introducing her students to the concepts, providing self-assessments, and assigning them curiosity journals in which they wrote from the heart in free-form style. At the end of her experiment, Christy found that her classroom had transformed into an active community of reflective learners. 

“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers,” she said. “It was kind of utopian.”

To Dan Speak and Jason Baehr, the co-directors of the initiative, experiences like Christy’s are the ultimate outcome of the Intellectual Character Initiative. They hope that by inspiring and empowering faculty and academic leaders to focus on intellectual character formation, they will influence how students learn and grow.

Though both Speak and Baehr are professors of philosophy, they are quick to emphasize that this is not principally a philosophical project. Professors across the university care about their students growing in curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual perseverance, and the like. Still, it is no accident that both philosophers are particularly interested in epistemology — that is, in the theory of knowledge. And, indeed, Baehr is an expert in “virtue epistemology,” which is an approach to the philosophical study of knowledge that focuses on intellectual virtues. 

Furthermore, Baehr is a highly regarded educational theorist who, in addition to publishing widely on the application of virtue epistemology to education, founded a public charter middle school in 2013 in Long Beach, Calif. The Intellectual Virtues Academy, as this school is known, was built from scratch to help students practice and develop virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and courage. The idea for the L.M.U. Initiative began to take shape when Speak, who serves on the board of directors for The Intellectual Virtues Academy, noted the irony of the deep impact of Baehr’s research and academic vision outside but not inside L.M.U. In 2024, they teamed up to create the blueprint for the L.M.U. project.

Their idea was brought to life thanks to a $943,668 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character. The Center is funded by the Lilly Endowment to seed and steer innovative character education initiatives in schools throughout the country. Like most start-up ventures, the L.M.U. Intellectual Character Initiative is moving in many directions, and no one is exactly sure where it will land. Speak and Baehr are nonetheless pleased with the energy and activity it has already prompted on campus. 

“The goal shifted from just learning the content to learning how to be good thinkers. It was kind of utopian.”

In this first phase, it is both concept and practice, with university lectures on the virtues themselves and introductory modules for first-year students. A large part of its focus is on faculty training through summer workshops and learning communities. Speak said the initiative has three main delivery points: students, faculty and leadership. “We hope these concepts will take root so that they become part of the whole culture of the university,” he said. 

Speak and Baehr believe that the Virtues of the Lion Mind align nicely with the school’s Jesuit mission, which holds dear concepts such as truth, reflection, and discernment. However, they hope these beliefs will, over time, become as prevalent in the school’s pedagogy and culture as they are in its mission statement. Indeed, everything about the three-year initiative is designed to resonate with a campus grappling with a number of realities that exist across higher education, including a decline in the humanities, R.O.I. pressure, viewpoint polarization, and students who report to lack meaning and purpose. 

The leaders’ first cultural hurdle was to carefully choose the six intellectual virtues they found most relevant to an L.M.U. education. They arrived at: curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, intellectual courage, and intellectual perseverance. “Curiosity gets the learning process started,” Baehr said. “We’ve also identified two pairs of virtues that complement and constrain each other. Intellectual humility helps us own our intellectual limitations, while intellectual autonomy compels us to own our intellectual abilities. Similarly, open-mindedness disposes us to give a fair hearing to alternative perspectives, while intellectual courage helps us have the courage of our convictions. Finally, intellectual perseverance keeps the process of inquiry going even when obstacles arise, as they always do.” 

Asked why the initiative feels particularly relevant at this moment in time, the scholars described the need to navigate what they call “a polluted information landscape.” “We need to be appropriately skeptical and cautious, but we also need to be trusting of the right sources, and in today’s digital world, that makes significant demands on who we are as thinkers,” Baehr said. “Intellectual virtues equip us to do this responsibly and competently.” 

Another issue the initiative addresses is polarization and the inability of all parties to give a fair hearing to another’s point of view. “We can’t have a democracy, if we can’t listen to and learn from one another,” Baehr said. “Here is where intellectual humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness come to the fore, but also a certain amount of intellectual firmness and courage to engage in public discourse with appropriate confidence and firmness.” 

Speak and Baehr said that the growth and ubiquity of artificial intelligence loomed large over their thinking about the project and prompted the late addition of “intellectual autonomy” to the Virtues of the Lion Mind.

“We knew the A.I. stuff would be an issue,” Speak said. “So, we identified intellectual autonomy as a way to frame how students and faculty ought to think about A.I. This intellectual virtue involves thinking for yourself. When you exercise it, you are making the ideas and knowledge your own. The knowledge didn’t just pass through you. You got to the point of understanding by your own agency.” 

Practical Virtue

One of the advantages of the initiative is that it provides a language and pathway for a variety of stakeholders on campus, from Amanda Christy’s need to reinvigorate her classroom, to the university librarians who, in service to enlightenment, have embedded descriptions of the virtues in their basic “how to use the library” modules.  

For Father Dorian Llywelyn, the virtues promise to awaken fundamental principles of scholarship and learning, and perhaps, a resurgence in Jesuit spirituality. A theologian and historian, Father Dorian leads the Center for Ignatian Spirituality at L.M.U. and sees his role there as connecting Jesuit values to the academic pursuits of the university. 

As part of his work, Father Dorian said he seeks to reach people who have diverse beliefs with some kind of common platform. 

“I want to give people something of use and value that somehow belongs to them, and they belong to it,” he said. “That is why I was particularly interested in the work of Dan and Jason. What they are doing is 100 percent in keeping with the tradition of Jesuit education, but it rearticulates it in a way that is relatable to many who may see religious terminology as a barrier. Even though they are not coming at this from a distinctly Christian or Jesuit viewpoint, there is great synergy there.” 

Father Dorian recently hosted a weekend retreat for people involved in the initiative. Each participant took personal time to ponder what the work might look like in their respective roles. He also sat in on the faculty learning community and came away feeling the virtues could help address some of the lingering ills within higher education, including siloing and what he called “misguided zeal” among faculty. 

“Intellectual humility works against indoctrination because you can’t be doctrinaire when you are intellectually humble,” he said. 

On the faculty learning communities, he said, “bringing people of all different disciplines together to share their diverse viewpoints is what we should be doing all of the time. Doing so is an intellectual delight that raise us up and brings out the very best of us.” 

In supporting this work, Father Dorian can’t help but wonder if the virtues initiative might ignite a resurgence in the interface between academia and spirituality, something that has fallen away over time in most Jesuit institutions. 

“What is it to be a thinking person of virtue but also a thinking person of faith?” he asked. “My area of interest is trying to articulate that relationship better.” 

With champions like Father Dorian, Speak and Baehr hope that the Intellectual Character Initiative may eventually become an integral part of both the academic and co-curricular life of the university. But there is a long way to go before it transforms from an overlay — a program — to part of the DNA. As cultural change theory dictates, it will be the accumulation of small developments that will eventually move the needle in that direction, which is why the experiences of individual students may be the most promising. 

In describing what she learned in Amanda Christy’s class, a young woman wrote in her curiosity journal, “Curiosity helps you question your own assumptions and it pushes you to see different perspectives which can make you more thoughtful when facing problems in the world. Curiosity isn’t about knowing every fact but putting yourself out there to learn and grow. In all, that kind of curiosity is something I’ll carry with me far beyond this class.” 

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

A Soldier’s Journey

Posted on by Mollie Ames

When Adam Delaney entered college in 2024, he’d already honed a remarkable set of skills. He wasn’t fresh off captaining a high school team or founding a club like many other first-years. Around the time most of his classmates were born, Delaney was 19, joining the Marines, and readying for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his 20s, he was concerned about life or death, rather than As or Fs. 

That doesn’t mean navigating higher ed came easily when he decided to go back for his bachelor’s at 40. His time in the service made him supremely competent at tackling situations most civilians can’t imagine; it also made doing anything else afterwards challenging in a way most will never understand.

So what can colleges and universities do to give veterans like Delaney the greatest shot at success? At Arizona State University, the expansion of services for military-connected students has been critical amid the ballooning of that population — up nearly 15,000 in the last four years alone. The approach, though, has gone beyond streamlining systems for processing G.I. benefits, as important as those are. Leadership at A.S.U.’s Pat Tillman Veterans Center is investing in a tailored and deeply relational style of support, aiming to pull in those like Delaney and keep them — through to graduation. 

While Delaney knew little about the Pat Tillman Center before enrolling at A.S.U., he now attributes it with restoring a sense of family he didn’t realize he’d missed. “It makes it feel more like we [veterans] belong than anything else,” he said. “Students who are there just out of high school or something like that, they all share that; they have that community with each other. So it was cool to have our own community as well.”

The Uphill Battle

In 2011, the Pat Tillman Center launched to offer military-connected students, who include current and former service members and their dependents, a designated space for advising and connecting with each other. Spanning 3,340 square feet in the basement of the student union on the main Tempe campus, the facility replaced the old face of A.S.U. veteran support: a window in the registrar’s office where students could go, slip their paperwork under the glass, and be on their way. 

When the center opened, fewer than 2,000 military-connected students attended A.S.U. Now there are 25,000. A surge in remote learning has been key to the rapid expansion of both the university’s military population and its general one. Of the 194,000 students at America’s largest public university, more than a third are remote; at least 11,000 of them are military-connected.

The expansion of services for military-connected students has been critical amid the ballooning of that population — up nearly 15,000 in the last four years alone.

Shawn Banzhaf, the executive director of the Pat Tillman Center, believes the center has helped drive enrollment, whether online or off, by sending a message to service members that they matter here. “The more you can understand them, the more they feel like they belong, the more they’ll stay here, and the more they’ll tell their buddies about it,” he said. The strategy is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: The more vets who come in chasing the promise of community, the stronger it gets. Eventually it’s 25,000 and counting.

Of course, the numbers mean very little without the necessary support to back students up and bring them together. A point of pride for the Pat Tillman Center staff is that most served in the military, so they’re intimately familiar with the challenges their students can encounter. Banzhaf described a road through college riddled with fits and starts. In 1991, he enlisted in the Army National Reserve freshly out of high school, in large part to be able to pay for higher education. Once he found himself juggling a civilian career as a police officer, a family, and deployments, including 15 months in Iraq, he was forced to adapt. In the end, 20 years passed before he finished his degree.

From 2003 to 2010, Adam Delaney completed multiple combat deployments in the Middle East. Photo credit: Adam Delaney

Banzhaf said the challenges veterans encounter in college — and the Pat Tillman Center aims to address — are wide-ranging and sometimes surprising, especially to those on the outside. One of the most underestimated, he finds, is the financial strain. While the G.I. Bill may cover expenses like tuition and housing costs, it can leave others, from food to gas to medical bills, to pile up, while income has often stopped coming in. 

Adam Delaney had been out of the Marines for more than a decade when he decided to go back to school. Nervous about abandoning his six-figure salary as a sales manager at O’Reilly Auto Parts, he turned to the Pat Tillman Center early on, finding staff could walk him through options — scholarships, work-study, federal aid — to lighten the load. They armed him with a detailed checklist to guide him through finding and completing the necessary forms. “They took the stress away,” he said. “I could do this without having a job and, you know, survive.”

Other concerns for student veterans are more cultural. They don’t just tend to be older or in a different life stage than their peers; they’re adjusting to a vastly different way of life. Military tradition emphasizes structure, disciple, and respect for hierarchy, Banzhaf said. “Veterans are used to you saying, ‘Do this, then go here. Do this, then go here and do this.’ And if you don’t do all these things, somebody gets killed.” In college, there are far fewer rules and almost no play-by-play instructions. Veterans often chafe, Banzhaf said, at the sight of students glued to their phones in class, ignoring their professor. 

To help with this transition, A.S.U. offers specific orientations and a first-year College 101 course tailored to veterans’ needs and experiences. “Veterans don’t need to know how to live in dorms,” Banzhaf said. “They don’t need to know the best practices of staying away from the bars.” Instead, Student Success for Veterans covers issues like the “hidden curriculum” — rules and expectations often implicit in higher ed but unknown to those who have been out of school for a while. Students also learn how to help others navigate trauma, and Banzhaf said many come to realize the ones most in need of help are themselves. 

Trauma is a critical barrier the Pat Tillman Center recognizes can impede veterans’ success. Delaney said his alcoholism, which spawned from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tours in the Middle East, led to two uncompleted degrees at two different community colleges before he got to A.S.U. That’s why he’s now pursuing a degree in social work to support other veterans on similar recovery journeys. It’s also why Banzhaf and his team continue to build out a range of programming for holistic wellbeing, from equine and art therapy to guitar and cooking classes. “If you can think of a way,” Banzhaf said, “we’re doing it.”

Trekking Through

One of the Pat Tillman Center’s most unique offerings is a program called Treks for Vets, which involves leading a group of student veterans in a rigorous, multi-day hiking trip. Banzhaf was part of a team that started the program after participating in a similar one with a Colorado-based nonprofit, Huts for Vets. He spent four, ten-hour days in the Aspen Mountains, climbing between 9,000 and 12,000 feet in elevation, and found the experience as rewarding as it was exhausting. In the wild he learned he hadn’t resolved his trauma from the war as completely as he’d thought. 

Back at A.S.U., Banzhaf was committed to helping recreate the opportunity for his students. Now, twice a year, he takes a group of seven to 10 A.S.U. veterans to a base camp in northern Arizona for four days of trekking — and then some. The students do readings and discuss them together. They relish in nature, disconnected from technology. They participate in morning Qigong, a meditative movement practice. They eat nourishing meals.

The bonds that form during this time are not so dissimilar from ones formed in military service.

The bonds that form during this time are not so dissimilar from ones formed in military service, Banzhaf said. In both contexts, participants are pushed together in a uniquely close way and made vulnerable by grueling exercise. An important differentiator is that, on Treks for Vets, students have the opportunity to be open, whether on the trail or in organized conversations, about some of the most challenging and raw elements of their service. There’s no rank or title here, Banzhaf likes to remind them. 

“All of a sudden these hard chargers that are used to not showing any emotion at all, because it could cost you your job or it could show that you’re weak and it could hurt your pride, start opening up because it really, truly doesn’t matter,” said Delaney, who was a participant in Treks for Vets before becoming a trip leader. He’s seen conversation topics run the gamut among his expeditions, though the through-line is veterans being open and connected in a rare and freeing way. Sometimes they talk about combat and trauma. Other times it’s the transition to college. “And that’s fine too,” Delaney said, “because it’s something people have been holding in, and we all sit and talk about it.”

Not everyone signs up for Treks for Vets wanting or expecting more than a camping trip. But most, Banzhaf suspects, “come because they need something.” Maybe it’s a change of scenery; maybe it’s connection or direction or meaning. Students who were contemplating suicide have told Banzhaf the trip kept some them from attempting. “It brought them to a place of hope and encouragement and community and all the things that all of us need anyway, but they just hadn’t found it, yet.”

Banzhaf’s only regret where Trek for Vets is concerned is that it can’t reach more students. Ideally, he said, he’d be running trips four times a year, but without the funding to train new staff, expansion just isn’t in the cards right now. At $15,000 per trip, Treks for Vets ends up eating up about a third of the Pat Tillman Center’s $100,000 annual operating budget, which depends on a per-student stipend from the Veterans Affairs Department. The university covers salaries for staff, but there’s always room for more. Where the V.A. recommends universities hire one School Certifying Official per 125 student G.I. Bill users, Banzhaf has just eight, attending to thousands.

The limitations on staff make the strength of connections among students that much more important. Delaney believes he’s never felt like a “number” among vets at A.S.U. because of the emphasis on peer support. In his first fall, it was often students — some working for the Pat Tillman Center, others not — who were his confidants and helped him learn about new opportunities for military-connected students or talk through challenges. This semester, Delaney and a friend from Treks for Vets buddied up to take all the same classes after discovering they share the same field of study. “We know who the other veterans are when we see them walking down the hallway like, ‘Yep, that guy’s a vet, or that girl’s a vet.’ You can spot them,” he said. “That starts the conversation.”

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

How to Thrive at College with Mathilde Ross

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On this episode of LearningWell Radio, psychiatrist Mathilde Ross of Boston University shares wisdom and advice for students heading off to college — and their parents — from her new book, “How to Thrive at College: A Guide to the Ups and Downs of Mental Health on Campus.” Ross’ candid and thoughtful account of her work with young people is at once surprising, instructive, and hopeful.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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

Becoming a Better Version of Myself

Posted on by Mollie Ames

I can still remember the suspense that I felt while sitting there at the desk in my dorm room during my first year in our nation’s capital. I looked out over the Potomac River, to the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument beyond, at a view that inspired me to do great things in the service of others. My long-held dream had supposedly come true: I was finally studying politics at Georgetown University. I thought that I had done everything “right” to lead me to that point. I had studied hard, volunteered on countless campaigns, been a good friend, and listened intently in class and at church. Yet I could not help but be overwhelmed by a sense that by crossing through the front gates of Georgetown’s campus, my life at home with my family and friends, shaped by a desire to make my community and the world a better place, had come to a close. A new life seemed to have begun. But making the most of a new life, in a new place, with new people, is a big task. I asked myself: Was I up for the challenge? What kind of person would I become?

Before I knew it, I met the best people to help me explore these big questions, and I learned that I was thinking about my calling at Georgetown all wrong. Spending time with my residential minister, Fr. Christopher Steck, working for the Jesuit community on campus, and heading on retreat taught me that my time at Georgetown wouldn’t be a time for reinventing myself but instead a time for refining who I was, whose I was, and what I was called to be. I will forever be grateful to Georgetown for “meeting me where I was” in this regard. I had resources in my dorm (a residential minister), on campus (a robust campus ministry and a meaningful employment opportunity), and beyond (a dedicated retreat center) to help me take stock of where I had been, where I was, and where I was called to go. 

My time at Georgetown wouldn’t be a time for reinventing myself but instead a time for refining who I was.

Through this discernment, I realized just how big of an adjustment coming to college really was, no matter if I had moved across the state or relocated across the world. It was time in which I would have to build a new network of supporters to celebrate with in times of triumph and to lean on in times of need. Yes, it would be important to make new friends and get involved in extracurricular activities, but it would also be important to find new mentors to guide me through this time in my life, whether they were in my shoes three years ago or 30 years ago. I found a role model in an upperclassmen leader of one of my favorite clubs, the admissions ambassador program. I found a space for solace with a professor who taught us her favorite stories from New York City in between recording book reviews for NPR. I found a springboard for ideas and decision-making in the priest of the neighboring parish who challenged me to consider the person I was and to develop different parts of my personality. 

One of the most crucial guides along my journey was our vice president for student affairs, Eleanor Daugherty. “Dr. Elly,” as I came to call her, taught me that making the most of my experience wouldn’t mean doing everything or doing the “right” things but making the experience better for myself and for others. By investing in this place like my mentors, professors, and peers were investing in me, I would make “the Hilltop” my home. This involved the tremendous opportunity to work alongside Dr. Elly and her team in Student Affairs on efforts to make communities across Georgetown feel a greater sense of inclusion. Whether entering into dialogue with students regarding what they needed to have more comfortable facilities on campus or expediting the implementation of gender-inclusive housing (not in spite but because of our Catholic and Jesuit mission), we have worked to make more people feel like they belong. That, in turn, is how I found my sense of belonging: by working to build and strengthen communities on our Hilltop and beyond.

By investing in this place like my mentors, professors, and peers were investing in me, I would make “the Hilltop” my home.

Now in my senior spring, as I prepare to graduate, I am happy to report that I did not become a new person during these four years. Instead, I became a smarter, kinder, more worldly, and harder working version of myself. Georgetown provided the people and the opportunities for me to discern just who I was and what I was called to be at my university. I pursued lifelong dreams, like working on Capitol Hill and studying abroad under the Tuscan sun, and picked up new practices, like caring for our bulldog mascot Jack and advising a university administrator. But I also left some things behind, all the while curating, not creating, my most joyful, authentic self. Through this process, my college experience was not transactional but, rather, transformational. This transformation was not unilateral, though. As I was becoming my more authentic self, I was helping my university to more authentically live its mission. 

Institutions of higher education can help students flourish by providing spaces for reflection and growth. These institutions can flourish, too, if they reflect upon their adherence to missions, open themselves to student and stakeholder feedback, and enable these groups to help in creating real change on campus. Even though I am filled with gratitude for my time as a student on the Hilltop, I hope that these are not the best four years of my life. In that same light, I hope that these are not the best four years for Georgetown. Instead, I hope I remember this as an informative time, full of high highs and low lows, when a new network of support formed around me in the shape of tremendous friends and mentors. A time when I learned not to be afraid to be myself and I found those who embraced me. A time when I learned to be present, to be patient, to trust, and to grow, and hopefully imparted these lessons onto Georgetown, too.

Michael C. Woch is a senior at Georgetown graduating this spring.

Learning Away  

Posted on by Mollie Ames

It was senior night at one of the last home basketball games of the season at Simsbury High School. Just before tipoff, Emmanuel, one of the team’s captains, stepped onto center court amidst the roaring applause of his family, friends, teachers, and teammates.    

The team didn’t come away with a victory that night, but for Emmanuel, it was another step in a remarkable journey. At 13, he left his home in the Bronx to live at the Simsbury A Better Chance (ABC) House and attend Simsbury High School in Simsbury, Connecticut, a quintessential New England town that is predominantly white and affluent.

A Better Chance is a national program promising middle and high students, both boys and girls, from historically underserved communities the opportunity to attend high-performing independent day schools, boarding schools, or community school programs (C.S.P.) throughout the country. Its mission is to give deserving students access to high-quality transformative educational opportunities that support them in reaching their full potential and substantially increase the number of well-educated young people of color prepared to assume positions of responsibility and leadership in American society.

Founded in 1973, the Simsbury ABC program is a C.S.P. for boys and is known by the stately brick colonial located at the center of town, called the ABC House. The boys live there five to eight at a time with resident directors and a resident advisor. The resident advisor runs daily study hours to help the scholars complete their class homework/projects and prepare for tests. Additional academic advisors assigned to each scholar provide guidance on courses, extracurricular activities, or volunteer passion projects over their four years at Simsbury ABC. Each scholar is also matched with a Simsbury host family with a son in his same class and with whom he spends one weekend a month. 

At Simsbury ABC, the scholars experience far more than a chance to attend a better school with a stronger path to college. What they learn navigating high school away from home, and immersing themselves in a community vastly different from their own, prepares them for success in life as well as school. Indeed, the resilience and persistence these scholars exhibit make them excellent candidates for colleges and universities hoping their students will thrive.  

A House and a Home 

Sheri Eklund and her husband Jae have been the ABC House resident directors for the last four years. They live in an apartment connected to the main house, though they spend most of their time with the boys, getting them on the bus, driving them to sports, and eating dinner with them every night at 5:30 p.m. On a typical night, the boys line up at the buffet, pile their plates with the home-cooked meal the ABC House chef has prepared for them, and assemble around the oversized dining room table. 

As Eklund described: “It is that one time of day between after-school activities and before mandatory study hours when everyone is together.”

Eklund, who is a pediatric nurse practitioner by training, is both pragmatic and warm. Her affection for, and protection of, the boys in her care, is evident. In talking about them to others, she leads with their strengths and their hopes and says even she is not fully aware of the challenges they may have faced in their young lives. As resident director, she is both parental figure and advocate, whether getting resources together for a boy to pursue a particular sport or hobby or meeting with the high school principal about any issues of concern. 

Her approach to supporting the scholars is, not surprisingly, straightforward. “These guys should have every opportunity to do what they want to, just like every other student in this town,” she said. 

The resilience and persistence these scholars exhibit make them excellent candidates for colleges and universities hoping their students will thrive.  

On one particular Tuesday, over their “make-their-own” quesadillas, the boys talked about how it is they came to live at the ABC House. Of the current scholars, Emmanuel, Isaias, and Julian are from New York City; David is from Maryland, and Joakim is from nearby Hartford. They all said they are in Simsbury because adults in their lives envisioned a different educational path for them. It is hard to believe their belief in themselves didn’t also contribute, but for now, they are happy to talk about others who are responsible for their participation.    

Emmanuel’s mother insisted he not go to the high school all of his friends were planning to attend in the Bronx. David, a junior, had a similar story: His dad had found the program years earlier for his older sister and encouraged him to leave Baltimore for his high school years so he might get into a good college, as she had.  

Isaias, a freshman who has only been at the House a few months, left New York City for Simsbury after only two years in the country. Having come with his family from the Dominican Republic, he had been performing well in bilingual classes (Spanish and English) when his teacher encouraged him to take a monolingual track (English only) for eighth grade. When Isais continued to do well, she suggested he apply to the ABC program, a decision his family strongly supported.  

Later, Eklund explained that the boys come to the program for a variety of reasons, starting with the program’s premise — to get a higher quality education. But, having gotten to know their families, Eklund said it’s about more than just escaping something that doesn’t work.  

“Most of the families are first-generation immigrants, many directly from Africa, and they have a culture where there is an expectation that they will send their children somewhere where they will do their best. It’s very different from what we often think of here, which is, ‘Oh, I could never send my kid away.’”  

While the boys no doubt appreciate the good intention, they are honest about how difficult it was at first to leave their neighborhoods. Isaias is still adjusting to a new school and being away from his friends who played pick-up soccer and welcomed him into their community when he arrived in the country. Starting again is hard, but the other boys in the house are supportive, knowing full well how he feels. He recently joined a soccer club, which the Eklunds arranged for him with funds from the program. 

Sports is a common channel for belonging for any teenager, particularly for the ABC scholars. “Freshman year, I didn’t play a sport, so I didn’t really have anything to talk to anyone about but school,” said David, who now fences and rows crew. “But when I started playing sports, I started making more connections, and it all made more sense to me.” 

For Emmanuel, the combination of leaving his friends behind and worrying about making new ones was initially tough. “I was in the Bronx my whole life, and my friends and I, we were going to stick with each other, and then I was the one going away. When I got here and went to my first day of school, I saw only three or four people that looked like me.” 

Emmanuel said it’s now hard to imagine those days, as he prepares to graduate with what he called “some of the best friends of my life.”  

“I think if you put yourself out there, you’ll find you have more in common with people than you think,” he said. “I have great friends. I don’t have a really big circle like some people do, but I think having a small circle of really good friends is better.” 

David, too, has found his footing. He sees his time at Simsbury High School as a series of learning experiences, all leading to knowing who he is as a person. “All I knew was what life was like for the first 14 years of my life in Baltimore, and then when I saw how people acted here, my first instinct was to be more like everyone else. But when you do that, it becomes really apparent how different that is from who you really are.”   

The level of maturity the boys exhibit is the first clue to the impact their experience at the ABC House is having on them. With a fair amount of independence (like doing their own laundry and walking down the street for Chinees food), they are held accountable not just for their behavior and their grades but for how they contribute to a household of different people with a healthy number of rules.  

“Sometimes, I’ll think, ‘Oh no, I can’t get along with this guy,’” Emmanuel said. “And then it all works out.” 

“Yeah,” David added. “We all come from different backgrounds and have different personalities, but we definitely get along. We just have to solve stuff.” 

While it may be challenging at times, the boys in the ABC House regularly form a strong bond and a common commitment to who they are as ABC scholars. “If I had to come up with one way to describe them, I’d say they are like brothers,” said Kara Petras, a Spanish teacher at Simsbury High School and a board member at the ABC House. “They are a nuclear unit, but they are always folding in new kids and including the other boys in these new friendships.” 

Petras has had several ABC scholars in her class and, as a long-time volunteer at the program, gotten to know many of the boys over the years.  

“I’m like their mom at school,” she said. “We’ll start a group text at the end of the day for anyone needing a ride home.”  

Petras first learned about the ABC Program when she was in high school in Massachusetts and made friends with some of the girls who participated. Getting to know other people her age of a different culture had a major influence on her. She believes the same is true of how the ABC scholars contribute at Simsbury High School.  

“They carry with them the reputation of the ABC House in how they behave, and I think that rubs off on people,” she said. “They take their classes seriously. With their work ethic, their attention to detail, and their willingness to stay after school, you can tell they have a lot more skin in the game than a regular high school student. They are the kind of students you want your own kids to be.” 

It’s accolades like these that Eklund draws on to lift her spirits whenever she hears comments that reveal a lingering bias.

“When I tell people what I do, I get a lot of, ‘Oh, that must be really hard.’ People will ask me, ‘How do they do in school?’ or ‘Do you have to deal with a lot of behavior problems?’ I just tell them these kids are here for a reason. They’re great students; they do well in school.” 

The current residents of the ABC House said they find Simsbury to be a welcoming town, if different than what they are used to. And it is clear that those who run the program are all acutely aware of the need for the boys to feel they belong in order to do well. The host family model has resulted in life-long mentors and friendships. And in a classic it-takes-a-village approach, there is a strong circle of support that includes school counselors, coaches, teachers, and volunteers — all with eyes on the boys as they live, learn, and grow.

Hopes and Dreams 

On a Sunday afternoon in the ABC House living room, the boys talked excitedly about college and what they will do afterward. Isaias has his sights on N.Y.U., having heard they have an excellent transportation program, a combination of mechanics and engineering. David is also interested in mechanical engineering, in part because he has always been good at math. Emmanual dreams of being in sports marketing but will major in business generally as to not limit his choices. He is just now deciding which of the accepted colleges he will attend. No doubt his love of basketball will follow.   

True to its goal, the ABC House boasts alumni who are an impressive array of professionals and graduates, with more than 95 percent of participants going on to college. At the ABC House in Simsbury, alumni regularly return and are on a quarterly Zoom call where they mentor the boys on academics, college prep, or just life at Simsbury High. Seeing themselves in these professionals gives the current scholars the inspiration to pursue the road they are on and to appreciate what it might be teaching them, even if they don’t always realize it.  

“We hear all the time from the guys before us that even though we go to the same school as all the other kids, living in this house gives us a big leg up on college,” David said. 

With end of year approaching, the ABC scholars and alumni will be taking another step in their journey. The current residents will be heading home for work, summer courses, or preparing to leave for college. Some of the boys who came before them will be graduating from college; others are out of school and will keep in touch as mentors. Their individual success is the ultimate goal of the support team that has watched them grow in remarkable ways.  

Asked what she appreciates most about her experience at the ABC House, Eklund said, “The human spirit of all of it: meeting the families, making our mission work — not just with education but with everything — and seeing them grow and following them through and letting them know, ‘You guys are going to be successful. You are going to be great leaders in your communities.’”

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

“Bits and Pieces” by Alexis Seith

Posted on by Mollie Ames

This story, from Georgia Tech student Alexis Seith, explores how we can pursue feelings of wholeness by noticing fragments of ourselves – regardless of whether those fragments can be pieced back together. Alexis finds both pain and beauty in the pieces of her life as well as a way to hold both at once. This story was produced in partnership with The Narrative Engineer conference through The Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jumping In

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On a weekday morning during spring break, a group of first-year and second-year college students gathered around a patient whose condition began to change. The patient’s blood pressure was rising, breathing growing shallow. Sudden drooling. 

It wasn’t a real patient. Behind the scenes, an instructor controlled the simulation using a mannequin. But the patient’s recovery wasn’t the point. The students’ introductory glimpse to the field of medicine was.

For some students, this might have been a confirmation: Yes, this is exactly what I want to do. For others, the realization could have been a cooler response, which would be just as important: Maybe this isn’t for me.

That moment — of clarity, uncertainty, or recalibration — is what Tufts University hoped to spark with its new JUMP-IN pilot program, a weeklong, immersive experience designed to help primarily first-year and some second-year students step, however briefly, into the lives they think they want. Ask a room full of first- and second-year college students what they want to do after graduation, and many will have an answer: Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Ask them what those jobs actually look like, day to day, and the answers may resemble vague impressions, a composite of jobs observed on television and heard about through friends and relatives.

This gap — between aspiration and understanding — is not just anecdotal. Surveys from organizations like the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and Gallup have consistently found that while students feel pressure to choose a career path early, many lack meaningful exposure to what those careers entail. At the same time, research suggests that students who engage in experiential learning — internships, simulations, project-based work — are significantly more likely to feel confident in their career choices and to secure employment aligned with their interests after graduation. In other words, it’s not just about choosing a path. It’s about trying it on to see how it feels.

“We wanted students to begin to think about linking their interests to their academic learning to their career goals,” said Ellise LaMotte, the associate provost for student success at Tufts. The goal is not to arrive at definitive answers in a single week, but to develop the tools — and the self-awareness — to start asking better questions.

And just as importantly, students are encouraged to recognize when the answer might be, no thank you. “We did not want this program to just confirm what students already thought,” LaMotte said. “If someone came in thinking, ‘I want to be a doctor,’ and left realizing they didn’t —that was just as powerful.”

Learning by Doing 

Each JUMP-IN participant spends the week in one of five tracks, including pre-med and dental pathways as well as global policy, nutrition, and engineering-focused design. What unites them is a commitment to experiential learning. “The charge was that this needed to be hands-on,” LaMotte said. “The majority of the time was spent with them doing something.” 

In the Design Problem Solving (D.P.S.) track, that meant building structures out of melting Oreos — an exercise in material constraints and creative thinking. It meant working with modeling software, experimenting with 3D printing, and tackling real-world challenges. An open deck on top of the Tufts library was enclosed in glass so that it would be a safe place for students. But that design choice had an unexpected consequence: Birds were now flying into the glass. “One of the design flash challenges was: How can these students in this D.P.S. program for the week help to give some solutions to this problem?” LaMotte said. “So, it was a little tech heavy. But if you are somebody curious about how to solve problems, it would be appealing.”

For some, the experience was exhilarating. For others, it was clarifying in a different way. “There were students who realized, ‘This is harder than I thought,’ or ‘This isn’t what I imagined,’” LaMotte said.

In Global Policy Lab, students became senators in a climate policy simulation, debating legislation on a mock Senate floor at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston. They explored the role of drones in international security and engaged with local officials on immigration policy. 

In the Pre Med Connect track, students practiced suturing and patient care, responding to dynamic simulations that required quick thinking and teamwork. In the Dental Bridge track, students performed tooth wax-up modeling, simulation shadowing, suturing, and align impressions. In the Beyond the Plate track, students conducted “nutrition myth labs,” explored food systems, and visited facilities researching lab-grown meat. Across all tracks, students were asked not just to absorb information, but to apply it — to make decisions, test ideas, and reflect on outcomes.

For some, the experience was exhilarating. For others, it was clarifying in a different way. “There were students who realized, ‘This is harder than I thought,’ or ‘This isn’t what I imagined,’” LaMotte said. “And that’s valuable.”

Building Belonging through Shared Exploration

If JUMP-IN is about career exploration on the surface, it is equally about something deeper: connection. The program, piloted this spring break with 94 first-year students, was intentionally designed to reach those who may not yet have found their place on campus.

“Some of them knew each other,” LaMotte said. “But there were some who didn’t know anybody — and those are the folks we really, really wanted to get in touch with.” The challenge is a familiar one. The first year of college is often framed as a time of discovery and belonging, but for many students, that sense of connection doesn’t come easily. Social circles can feel closed, academic interests uncertain, and the path forward unclear.

From the moment students arrive, the program nudges them toward interaction. They are encouraged to sit with people they don’t know. They work in teams. They share meals, experiences, and, by the end of the week, reflections.

Even small moments matter. On the first day, one student resisted moving from a table where he sat alone, confident that others would eventually fill the space, and they did. Over the course of the week, LaMotte watched him gradually open up — participating more, volunteering, engaging in ways he hadn’t at the start.

Those shifts, while subtle, are central to the program’s purpose. By the end of the week, 96 percent of participants said they would recommend JUMP-IN to a friend, citing connection and community as key reasons. And perhaps more significantly, 84 percent reported feeling more comfortable reaching out to mentors, advisors, or faculty — a critical step in navigating both academic and career pathways.

Measuring What Matters

By traditional academic standards, a weeklong program like JUMP-IN might be difficult to evaluate. There are no grades, so the metrics that matter are different: curiosity satisfied, realism gleaned. It’s hard to measure some shifts in attitude because they might only appear downstream later — in the form of keeping one’s eyes open more keenly or an increased willingness to make inquiries of someone who does something you just might want to know more about.

At the most immediate level, student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. In addition to the 96 percent recommendation rate, students reported gains in career clarity, networking skills, and confidence in seeking support.

Thirty-two percent said the program led them to change their academic plans — a striking figure for a cohort just beginning their college journey. Another 38 percent reported feeling better equipped to leverage networks and support systems. Even exposure to research — a domain often reserved for upperclassmen — emerged as a meaningful outcome, with 17 percent of students reporting new experience in that area.

But the longer-term measures may prove even more significant. Tufts plans to track JUMP-IN participants and their progress over time, examining retention rates, academic trajectories, and career outcomes. Do students who participate feel more connected to the institution? Are they more likely to persist, to pivot when needed, to engage with mentors and opportunities? “We want to follow them along their path to figure it out,” LaMotte said. “They were in the JUMP-IN program and were interested in engineering; now they’re in political science. Why did that happen? Without surveying them to death, we would like to determine if JUMP-IN helped them make that change. Did they get support they need to be successful?” 

Lessons from the Pilot

Like any new initiative, JUMP-IN’s first iteration revealed areas for growth. The first was critical: using faculty to design and lead the program. “It took us a minute to figure out that faculty needed to run this and not staff. And once we made that decision, it made more sense because this is their area of expertise. Once we got faculty involved, we were able to really develop programming.” 

The most consistent feedback from students was the need for more unstructured time. The schedule, while engaging, was also intense. By midweek, small signs of fatigue had set in. “It was too structured,” LaMotte said. Future versions of the program will likely include more downtime and social activities — opportunities for students to build relationships outside of formal programming. “We need to give them more time to just connect and be with each other.” 

There were also logistical challenges, from coordinating transportation between campuses to managing meals while the campus is closed. But these are solvable problems, LaMotte noted, and, in some ways, evidence of the program’s scale and ambition.

Demand exceeded expectations, with 124 students applying for 100 spots. Plans are already underway to expand the number of tracks and increase capacity.

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of JUMP-IN is what comes next. The program is envisioned not as a standalone experience but as the first step in a four-year developmental arc. Tufts plans to introduce sophomore, junior, and senior versions of JUMP-IN, each tailored to students’ evolving needs.

The first-year program focuses on exploration and connection. Future iterations may emphasize deeper skill-building focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiation, navigation, along with civic impact and career development.

“We want it to grow with students,” LaMotte said, “and integrate JUMP-IN into the ethos of the undergraduate experience at Tufts.” 

In that sense, JUMP-IN reflects a broader shift in higher education — from viewing career development as a late-stage concern to embedding it throughout the undergraduate experience.

Capping the week, LaMotte was gratified to find the best evidence of the program’s success: In a session at the end where participants broke into sub-groups to share experiences, there was a buzz of animation in the room as students reflected on: what brought them joy, if their career focus changed, what skills they need to learn next, and how Tufts can further support them. For some, the experience reinforced a sense of purpose. For others, it raised new questions. But for all of them, it transformed an abstract idea — being this thing — into something tangible, complex, and real.

That transformation may be the most valuable outcome of all. Because the goal of programs like JUMP-IN is not to provide answers but to create encounters with possible futures and versions of themselves. In a higher education landscape increasingly defined by uncertainty, that kind of clarity — earned, and personal — may be just what students need to begin.

Experiencing Sadness with Bob McGrath

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On this episode of LearningWell Radio, Bob McGrath, a clinical psychologist and professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, offers his thoughts on an increasing debate over whether there is a problem in the United States with overstating or over-diagnosing mental illness, particularly among young people. McGrath’s perspective is informed by his expertise in human character research, suggesting people may be more emotionally attuned, sensitive, and distressed than ever. The question is: As we change, should the way we talk about our challenges change, too?

(For the full article mentioned in reference to the change, or stabilization, of depression rates globally, see here.)

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

Keeping it Real

Posted on by Mollie Ames

A new research update from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard poses an instructive question on the use of A.I.: Do large language models (L.L.M.s)  promote or impede flourishing? This seemingly simple question, if taken seriously, could prove to be an effective lens in considering how these technologies are designed and produced and how they are ultimately used.  

“Flourishing Considerations for A.I.”  applies the Human Flourishing Program’s six domains of flourishing — happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security — to five sets of considerations. Two pertain to A.I. product developers on the nature of the output provided by L.L.M.s and the specific design and packaging of particular A.I. products. The other three sets pertain to the user of A.I. products concerning decisions about the extent and nature of use, the effects of A.I. use on human knowledge, and the effects of A.I. on persons and communities.  

In identifying the players, motivations, and risks of L.L.M. technologies, the paper provides a guide, complete with guardrails and benefits, that brings us back to basics: Is our use of A.I. helping or hindering us when it comes to our ability to flourish as individuals and as a society? While the authors suggest ways to better build or use what currently exists, they do recommend eliminating one erroneous offering: the chat bot companion. They conclude that, for humans to flourish, we need to interact with other (real) humans.  

The following is an op-ed on the subject from Tyler J. VanderWeele, the lead author of the report and director of the Human Flourishing Program. The article originally appeared in Psychology Today. 

Can We Remain Human in the Age of A.I.?

By Tyler J. VanderWeele

Artificial intelligence technologies have been rapidly rising. Their potential applications are extraordinary, from information synthesis to robotic surgery, statistical analysis, civil engineering, and more. By leveraging and re-packaging vast quantities of existing knowledge, they seem to open endless possibilities for their use, but also for abuse.

Like any tool, A.I. can be used for good or for ill. If these technologies are to enhance human flourishing, rather than impede it, then we need to consider whether the design of A.I. technologies and our engagement with them are oriented towards our own flourishing. Of particular concern is how our use of these technologies is affecting our capacities for reason, for relationship, for transcendence, which go to the heart of our human nature. Are we finding a greater fulfilment through these tools? Or do they threaten to diminish and constrict our lives?

A Flourishing Lens

In a recent paper from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard published in the journal Information, we have put forward a set of Flourishing Considerations for A.I., discussing how a “flourishing lens” can guide decisions on the design and use of A.I. technologies related to: (i) the type of output provided; (ii) the specific A.I. product design; (iii) our engagement with those products; the effects this is having on (iv) human knowledge; and on (v) the self-realization of the human person.

Are we finding a greater fulfilment through these tools? Or do they threaten to diminish and constrict our lives?

We’ve made use of our general framework for conceptualizing and assessing human flourishing, oriented around six domains: happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial resources. We argue in our new paper that whenever an A.I. product is developed, and whenever we are deciding whether to use it, we should consider how it will affect our happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security, among other aspects of a good life. If the effect on some of these outcomes is likely detrimental, developers should consider whether it can be redesigned to mitigate these negative effects. Whenever it is clear that our own use would have negative effects on these outcomes, we should question whether we would be better off without it.

Respecting and Fulfilling Human Nature

Of particular concern is what these technologies might be doing to our nature as human persons. For instance, there is evidence that substantial use of A.I. tools such as “large language models” (L.L.M.s) can hinder users’ cognitive abilities. If we become weaker in our reasoning, we are flourishing less, not more, as human persons.

Given that L.L.M.s also get things wrong (so-called “A.I. hallucinations”), we should not place any absolute reliance on them or their products as sources of knowledge. They might be helpful in searches or in pointing us to relevant source material. However, knowledge fundamentally requires justified true beliefs, the justifying evidence that cannot be overturned. Evaluating evidence and searching for truth are fundamentally human activities. A.I. technologies may require a yet greater (not lesser) scrutiny of evidence than before if the web of human knowledge is not to be damaged.

Perhaps of yet greater concern is the potential effect of A.I. technologies on human relationships and our capacity to love. Various studies have indicated that roughly one-third or more of American teenagers are using A.I. agents for companionship, as friends, or romantic partners. While these might sometimes temporarily alleviate loneliness, the longer-term effects on flourishing are likely detrimental. They decrease the motivation and time available for engaging in face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, because A.I. chatbots are designed to be exceedingly agreeable and supportive, they also create unrealistic expectations as to the sort of interactions, sympathy, and comfort one may hope for in a real romantic partner or a friendship. They thereby also alter the broader social environment and our capacities to engage with one another. When our capacities to engage in real relationships are weakened, we are flourishing less, not more.

Certainly, there are cases in which A.I. chatbot applications can be helpful, from user-tailored educational opportunities (perhaps replacing Massive Open Online Courses – MOOCs) to skill-building programs for autistic children, to civil discourse training for college students. However, in each of these cases, the technologies should ultimately point us back to real human relationships. A human teacher, for example, not only helps in acquiring knowledge, but also in forming the whole person, in modeling the integration of knowledge into life and emotion, and in developing capacities for mutual understanding.

Such considerations as to the effects of A.I. technologies on human fulfillment also pertain to our artistic pursuits, our experience of beauty, and our search for meaning and purpose in life. Ultimately, we cannot outsource our meaning and our joy in relationships, our freedom and our responsibility, our reasoning and our understanding, our appreciation of beauty and our capacity for awe and wonder, or, in total, our flourishing, to technology. These things are a part of what it means to be human.

Practical Next Steps

Navigating all of this can undoubtedly be challenging. To help address these matters, we have recently launched a Flourishing and A.I. Initiative. We need to develop practical wisdom to determine which uses are beneficial and which are not. We should work together as individuals, as parents, and as communities, to develop the discipline needed to choose not to make use of these technologies when they are going to impede our flourishing. When we use A.I. technologies, we should ask ourselves how we might carry out such tasks better ourselves, to enhance our minds, not weaken them. We should limit use to ensure sufficient time to be with other people and in communities. We should continually question, with each use, whether it is enhancing or inhibiting our capacities as human persons.

These flourishing considerations also have implications for developers. Developers of A.I. technologies using chatbot interfaces should ensure they provide regular reminders that they are not human; that their outputs might be wrong; and that users might want to consider alternative activities or in-person human interactions. This could all be implemented immediately, with all A.I. chatbot products, and could considerably improve users’ decision-making.

Moreover, as noted above, while some chatbot products may indeed be beneficial, we believe developers should entirely discontinue the development of relational chatbots given the negative long-term effects these likely will have on human relationships. The detrimental effects of social media on youth flourishing may be only the tip of the iceberg if A.I. companions replace real relationships. Developers should ultimately spend their effort on designing products that will more likely have unambiguously beneficial or neutral effects on flourishing, and prioritize those over products that might be more mixed or detrimental, even if profitable. The development and promotion of these products carry with them moral commitments and responsibilities. We should hold developers morally and legally accountable for the foreseeable harms their products bring to users and society.

While any new technology comes with new opportunities and new challenges, including those that may affect possibilities for human fulfillment, the potential for A.I. technologies to severely alter, damage, and replace relationships is arguably unprecedented. We need to take these matters seriously if we are to flourish. The use of a flourishing lens in evaluating A.I. technologies is essential.

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