Month: December 2024

Growing Pains Through Time

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

Alexis Redding’s career has many interconnections. She was a college counselor who became a developmental psychologist to better understand why her students were struggling, despite their good choices. She now teaches her students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education about the kinds of emotional supports first year college students need but don’t often articulate. As the faculty chair of the school’s Mental Health in Higher Education Professional Education Program, she brings her training as a counselor to the necessary task of addressing student mental health from a variety of touch points.

In her recent book “The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood,” Redding continues to demonstrate the interconnectedness of life. With co-author Nancy Hill, she makes a strong case for giving young people the time and the license to become authentic authors of their own lives, as opposed to being “fast-tracked” into adulthood. Through a uniquely effective research method, the authors are able to reject the narrative that today’s students are over-protected and under-prepared by showing that becoming an adult has always been emotionally difficult. In addition to evidence within the literature, Redding and Hill review abandoned tapes of interviews with the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1975 and conclude that there are far more similarities than differences between that cohort and today’s Gen Z students.

Now, Redding and Hill are working on an extension of that research that involves reconnecting with the class of 1975 and interviewing Harvard classes of 2025 and 2026. The work is not yet complete but in our interview for LearningWell, we get a glimpse into what they are continuing to learn about the important developmental period known as “the college years.”

Here is an excerpt from our interview.

How did your experience as a college counselor and then a graduate school professor motivate you to write the book?

From my vantage point as a college counselor, I became concerned about how much our students were struggling emotionally in college, especially during  the transition to school. And, while the struggles they experienced were quite similar to each other, no one seemed to be talking about them. Consequently, our students described feeling very alone and even worried they were doing something wrong. Once I saw this pattern, I knew that I could better prepare my high school students in advance, but I worried that we were missing opportunities to ease the transition and normalize these challenges for all students once they arrived at school. I wanted to do work to help ease the transition more broadly.

It all starts with how we talk about college. The story young people hear, far too often, is about college being the ‘best four years’ of their lives. The gap between what they expect and the reality can be profound. We don’t talk enough about what is going to be hard or help them develop strategies for navigating these predictable obstacles. And we do them a disservice by not being candid about the challenges they will encounter. Today, I train future student affairs practitioners to help build meaningful support structures and foster the kinds of conversations that I wish my own students had found at college so many years ago.

One motivation for writing our book was to help normalize these challenges for students, for their parents, for faculty members, and for student affairs practitioners as well. We want to empower students and everyone who cares about them to understand what it’s really going to be like and to give them the language to talk about it openly. It’s great to see how this simple change can have such a profound impact.

The way you do that is amazing – revealing what college students of almost five decades ago were feeling from interviews done on the class of 1975. Did you and your co-principal investigator go looking for this kind of information?

Not at all! I discovered that these interviews existed when I was doing research on achievement culture in an old attic building here at Harvard. I came across some misplaced pieces of paper that suggested a study had been done about the college experience in the 1970s that no one ever wrote about. I wanted to know more. (My father was an archeologist, and he trained this sort of curiosity in me.) It took about nine months to figure out where these data had come from, and then to track down the recordings of the interviews. Nobody thought they still existed. But, after many months of calling up box after box from archival storage and going through the attic and the basement to find all the data, I put the entire study back together again and even found the original recordings. We had incredible sound technicians lift the student voices off these degrading old reel-to-reel tapes and we eventually listened to these student interviews from 1972-1975 on our iPhones.

Were you surprised at what you discovered?

Nancy and I went in thinking we would study what was different between college in the 1970s and college today. We thought it would be an incredible time capsule to document what had changed over nearly half a century. It was startling when we began to listen to the recordings because there was so little actual difference. Both of us were struck by how similar those students were to the students who we advise and teach today. It was an interesting puzzle for us. I even coded the data three different times using three different analytic techniques because we were looking for differences. But what we kept coming back to was similarity. And eventually, we realized, that was a powerful conclusion that really contradicted a lot of our popular narratives about “kids today.”

Remarkably, in all the archival work, I ultimately found the documents that told us why the original research team abandoned the study. We had assumed it was because Dr. William Perry, who led the original study, had retired. But then we found minutes from the meeting where they made the decision. It turns out that the motivation for the project was to replicate a study they conducted in the 1950s because they had also assumed they would find that “kids today” were so different 25 years later. What they determined through their analysis was that there was essentially no difference in the developmental experience between those two cohorts. For them, this was a failure. Of course, that was the exact conclusion we had already come to through our analysis decades later, but we had a different take. We were excited to understand why there were such meaningful similarities and to unpack that in our research.

Recognizing the parallels around loneliness and isolation across generations can help us better understand what is ‘typical’ and what is a genuine ‘crisis.’ 

Whenever we present this work, people inevitably ask, “but what about social media? What about covid?” And, of course, we asked those questions too. It would be silly to imagine those realities don’t impact our lived experiences. Of course they do! But what stays the same is the developmental experience, the process of figuring out who you are and asking the big questions: “Who am I? Who do I want to be? What do I want my life to look like?” That experience is not tied to a specific decade or a specific moment in time, despite how much has changed between the generations.

What implications do you think this has for addressing some of the emotional and behavioral health struggles college students report today?

For me, it’s most important to recognize that college has always been hard for a lot of people and that these challenges are predictable and follow some established patterns. One of the things we documented in our research was the profound sense of loneliness that was reported, especially in the first two years. And students talk about those challenges in similar ways between the 1975 and the 2025 cohorts. Recognizing the parallels around loneliness and isolation across generations can help us better understand what is ‘typical’ and what is a genuine ‘crisis.’ As soon as a student calls home to say they’re having trouble or questioning if they fit in at school, family members can immediately – and understandably – panic. But if we understand that this is an expected challenge and that this is indeed typical of the student experience, we can have very different conversations before that call happens and we can respond in ways that can be more helpful in the moment as well.

A strong theme in the book is our needing to give students time to pause the fast tracks of their lives and discover who they are. How did your research influence this conclusion?

One of the biggest similarities across the two cohorts is the intense pressure young people feel to have it all figured out on day one. Students in both generations also struggle to navigate differences between what they envision for the future and what their parents expect, what their friends are doing, and what society says. It can be hard to take action when their goals diverge from those external stories. Trusting their internal voice is growth edge for students in this age group and something we can scaffold.

We tend to push students to make decisions about their future before they are ready. And our students get very mixed messages from us, especially when they’re coming into a place with a liberal arts curriculum. They are told: “it’s time to explore, it’s time to test out different ways of knowing and learning.” But we simultaneously say, “Be careful! If you don’t take this course now, the door will close. You won’t stay on track and you will miss out.” If we believe that students need more time for exploration, our curriculum genuinely needs to allow for that.

This story now continues. Tell us about your current work?

We are still fascinated by the similarities across the generations, but we are seeking to identify meaningful differences and continue to test our hypotheses as well. With that in mind, we are replicating the study with the classes of 2025 and 2026. We are using the exact same protocol, interviewing students annually an asking just one single question, “what stood out to you from the academic year?” We are three years into that work now. As in the original study, we are only following Harvard students so we have a one-to-one comparison, but the hope is, of course, to be able to expand and study at very different institutions that are more representative of college students as a whole. This is really just the first step.

The other exciting follow up is that we were granted permission to reopen the original study, and so we’ve spent the last two years interviewing the original participants from the Class of 1975. It is such a gift to get to do this work. The last time we heard from these participants was in June of 1975 when they were 22 or 23 years old, graduating and making decisions about going to grad school or the workforce. Now we meet them in their early seventies and they are at another pivot point – retirement. And few of them thought about this study at all in the 45 years in between. So, we can capture their stories in two very distinctive and pivotal moments in their lives.

The students who found their way to mentors had the help they needed to ask meaningful questions — What do I really want to do?

We first ask these participants to tell us the story of their life as they would tell it today. Then we ask them if they want to listen to their recordings and meet their younger selves. It’s a fascinating time capsule of their lives from about 19-23 years old. They write reflections after each of the four recordings, and then they come back and participate in an interview to make meaning of both what they heard and how it’s different and similar from their recollections.

What are you learning?

It’s too early to share anything beyond top line takeaways, (we’re just now wrapping up the interviews), but one of the important things that we are hearing has to do with how they remember their time in college. None of them remember college being as hard as what they hear themselves talking about on the recordings. That’s simply not the story that they have told themselves for almost half a century. They forgot how lonely they felt. And that’s totally natural – knowing that things turned out ok softened the intensity of the emotions that they felt in the moment.

The other thing that has emerged from this work, and something Nancy and I care deeply about: a confirmation of the importance of mentorship. The students who found their way to mentors had the help they needed to ask meaningful questions — What do I really want to do? How do I translate my interests into a vocation? Having followed up with these students 50 years later, we were able to see how much even the smallest mentoring interaction mattered to their lives.

Unfortunately, too many students – in both generations – don’t have meaningful mentoring experiences. In the absence of genuine mentorship, it is too easy to land on a default path. Colleges and universities can be more intentional about creating opportunities for students to have a range of mentoring experience – not just the big, long-term relationships we tend to prioritize now. The small-scale mentorship interactions matter a lot – even 50 years later!

Listening from the Heart

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

Sometimes, the stories are hard to hear.  Laila Alsheikh, a bereaved Palestinian mother, told of how she was barred, by Israeli soldiers, from taking her 6-month-old baby to the hospital in the occupied West Bank. Gravely ill from tear gas, the child died the same day. For 16 years, she would not speak of it.

“I was filled with anger and rage and vowed I would never look or speak to an Israeli person again in my life,” she said. “And then I met Robi.”


Robi Damelin is an Israeli citizen, the mother of two sons, one of them lost to a Palestinian sniper. The pain she shares with Laila Alsheikh drew the women together as mothers, and now friends, despite being from warring nations. Their commitment to channel their grief into reconciliation and peace has made them colleagues in a cause called The Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF).


The PCFF is a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization of over 800 families, all of whom have lost an immediate family member to the ongoing conflict in Palestine and Israel, and all of whom have chosen a path of reconciliation rather than revenge. Alsheikh and Damelin’s stories, and those of many others, are in videos included in a new educational program the organization offers called Listening from the Heart. Developed through a collaboration with Georgetown University, Listening from the Heart offers communities a chance to engage in meaningful dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a human perspective. Its primary constituents are colleges and universities, many of whom are seeking ways to process the unrest that overwhelmed campuses after October 7th and the war in Gaza.


“You can’t really understand what this is all about, but you can understand what another human being may be feeling,” said Damelin, who is Spokesperson and International Relations Manager for the PCFF.  “When you recognize that, it creates trust.”


The impact of this work relies on the delivery of that message to people and organizations inside and outside of the Middle East. It asks us to consider “if those who paid the highest price for this conflict can understand and empathize, then shouldn’t we all?” 

The PCFF uses the “parallel narrative” method to communicate this message in conversations around the world. Typically, this involves two speakers — one Israeli, one Palestinian – who talk plainly about the loss they have suffered from the conflict, yet, at the same time, they have come to see the person on the other side as a human being and they describe that experience. The power of this shared humanity las led them to work and pray for peace.


With offices in both Israel and Palestine, the non-profit organization is partly funded by sources outside of the Middle East, including the United States. Since 2013, Shiri Ourian has been the Executive Director of the American Friends of the Parents Circle. She had been working to raise awareness and funds in the U.S. to support the work that was being done on the ground when the Israeli/Hamas war broke out on October 7, 2023.


“After that day, we got calls from so many communities, corporations, colleges and universities, even the World Bank, all saying the same thing – ‘neighbors are not talking to each other, there is tension between my senior staff, students are shouting at one another.’”


Ourian says the high demand for some kind of guidance in how to respond to the war accelerated the development of the Listening from the Heart program.


“We didn’t have the resources to just send people all over the country,” she said. “It became very apparent, very quickly that we needed to create a standalone program that people could access whenever they wanted to. And that’s what we did. Listening from the Heart is all based on the model of the Parents Circle pedagogy – the power of storytelling to create an emotional transformation.”


Continuing the Story

Well before October 7, 2023, Robi Damelin envisioned scaling the work of the Parents Circle with an academic partner who shared the organization’s mission. When the time was right, she immediately turned to Georgetown University. Her long friendship with then-president John DeGioia had pointed her in that direction since they first met at a Parents Circle forum back in 2008. As the highly-regarded leader of the Jesuit school, DeGioia had long embraced the non-profit’s mission of peace through dialogue. 

By the beginning of the new year, the task of turning compelling narratives into empathy-building and listening skills was in the hands of two of the university’s renowned teaching, learning, and innovation centers– the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and The Red House, Georgetown’s transformative education unit.


“This work really relates to Georgetown’s values,” said Kimberly Huisman, a curriculum developer at the Center who led the project with her colleague Susannah McGowan from The Red House. “Our ecumenical approach is welcoming to all faiths and our global perspective encourages students to see themselves as part of one world,” said Huisman.


McGowan says she hopes the program will complement a number of efforts the university is pursuing to promote dialogue and civil discourse at one of the most polarizing times in American history. She believes Listening from the Heart will build skills students need to understand conflict resolution in any situation.


“The question we are always asking ourselves is how do you design programs that help students grapple with very real challenges,” she said. “We need to provide spaces for what we call ‘productive tension’ so students will be equipped to face difficult topics once they graduate.”

Huisman and McGowan spent six months with the Parents Circle Families Forum creating videos and developing the curriculum. Listening from the Heart has four modules revolving around three different phases: preparing for, presenting, and processing the personal narratives. The course can be taught consecutively or spread out over time. The first module helps facilitators learn the background of the program. What are the goals of Listening from the Heart? What is the program not about? In preparing for the presentations, groups work on understanding the barriers to listening, i.e., “How do I engage with something I disagree with?” Presenting the work is where the series of personal narratives are featured; and the processing section involves reflection and learning from what has been presented.


“How do we listen to somebody when we’re triggered? How do we let somebody else know that they are heard?

Ourian says the goal of the program is to generate empathy and to reject the binary notion of one side vs the other. But it also involves building skills that will serve students for life.


“We help people build their listening skills in difficult circumstances,” she said. “How do we listen to somebody when we’re triggered? How do we let somebody else know that they are heard? Listening isn’t just about taking in information, it’s about acknowledging the other side – how do you do that when the other person’s truth feels like it’s in contradiction to your truth?”


An important component to the program is providing facilitators and participants the historical context to discuss the nuances of the conflict, the absence of which has exacerbated tensions on campuses. The preparation materials for facilitators warn “When American communities adopt a binary, simplistic view of the conflict, they magnify its complexities and distort the narrative to fit American contexts, which
may not accurately reflect the realities experienced by Palestinians and Israelis. Outsiders must consider whether their actions and engagement help resolve or worsen the conflict.”


While the program aims to turn caustic debate into productive discourse, it also hopes to give people who are afraid to talk about the conflict the words to do so effectively. “Mostly, people are just silent,” said Damelin. “After all the shouting and the statements, people are just shutting down. And that’s where this program steps in.”


The Listening from the Heart curriculum is now available on the American Friends of the Parents Circle Parents website for any community, with reduced fees for non-profits and no charge for public high school teachers. It has been endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers but the initial roll-out of the program in the U.S. is focused heavily on colleges. This fall, Damelin, Ourian and Alsheikh have been on a campus tour throughout the Northeast, promoting the program at a number of schools including Brandeis, Barnard, Columbia and New York University. They will soon head to the Midwest and west coast.


In November, the Parents Circle Families Forum and Georgetown University hosted a special program at Georgetown, the same week the team was asked to speak at the Washington Post’s Global Women’s Summit in D.C. There, before an audience of faculty, students and community leaders, they once again told their stories; sometimes painful, often joyful, always hopeful.


“Sometimes at a meeting, there will be Palestinians who don’t speak Hebrew and some Israeli’s that don’t speak Arabic,” Alsheikh told the audience. “But when they look at each other, they understand what each one is feeling and they start to cry and hug each other, without saying a word.”

Influencers for Life

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

Maggie Messina graduated from the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 2022. She works in Private Client Business Development at Cambridge Associates in Boston. Here is her response to the question: “What experience or person in college most influenced your development as a human being?”

College is a formative experience for all. It’s a time when you leave the safety of your hometown, the friends you’ve known forever, and all that is familiar to you. Amidst the unfamiliar faces and places, you begin to search for belonging. For me, during my first two years of college, an unexpected yet incredibly meaningful place of connection was the dining hall. 

At the heart of my dining hall experience was Derek, the welcoming presence at the swipe station. Derek wasn’t just the person who checked my student ID as I walked in—he became a constant source of positivity and encouragement during my transition to college life. As a freshman finding my footing, Derek always greeted me with an enthusiastic high five and hello. During the whirlwind of sorority rush week, he congratulated me when I got into my top-choice sorority, Tri Delta, even throwing his hands into a triangle to represent it everytime I walked through the doors wearing all my new merch. 

Derek wasn’t just the person who checked my student ID —he became a constant source of positivity and encouragement during my transition to college life. 

But it wasn’t just the celebratory moments that made Derek special—it was the way he showed up for me during the tough times. When I felt homesick or defeated by a bad grade, Derek was there with encouraging words and a hug that always made the day seem a little brighter. 

What I learned most from Derek is that kindness matters. Small gestures—like smiling and waving at someone as they pass, holding the door open for a stranger, or offering a pencil to your classmate when they forget—can have a ripple effect far beyond what we can see. Today, as a young professional, I strive to embody that same sense of kindness. It’s one of my current firm’s values, and I take pride in representing it every day. 

A Constellation of Support

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

When University of Denver (DU) was named Princeton Review’s #1 “school most loved by its students” this year, junior Libby Williamson was not surprised. She’d arrived as a freshman in 2021, when the school had recently added a student-centered learning pilot called the 4D Experience.  One of the hallmarks of 4D is the peer mentor program, and that mentorship was one of the things that had made the campus feel so accessible and supportive during her first year. Today, that program is central to her own identification as a peer mentor and leader, and to her personal and professional development.

“I think 4D and its emphasis on mentorship is so valuable to the student experience,” says Williamson, a communications major. “It’s this holistic approach to a college education that focuses on more than just academics, prioritizing my growth as an individual and as a confident, well-rounded professional by the time I graduate.”

The pilot of the 4D Experience launched in fall 2020 as an educational philosophy of living and learning, both inside and outside the classroom, based on four dimensions of development. But to understand 4D, and its goals that are simultaneously lofty and practical, it helps to understand the social context. The University of Denver, like many other institutions, was facing the pressures of higher education in flux.

A Turning Point

When DU was designing its strategic future vision in 2016, the message was steeped in positivity: to affirm its strengths and engagement and expand upon them. But it was no small coincidence that the motivation to reconceive the school’s vision was coming at a time of larger challenges, and change.

The chancellor at the time, Rebecca Chopp, believed the university was ready for a turning point, an opportunity to evolve with a new vision within the larger storm brewing in higher education over a host of issues from cost and value to free speech.  In 2014, the school’s Strategic Issues Panel published a report titled “Unsettling Times: Higher Education in an Era of Change.” It cited a growing list of perceived shortcomings in American higher education, from the rapidly rising cost of tuition to the alleged failure to provide a meaningful—or practical—education for students. “The report is intended to appropriately define the urgency of the moment,” states the opening letter from the panel’s leaders, “and also to stimulate the collective creativity of the academic community.”

The resulting strategic vision, DU Impact 2025, offered broad strokes for a rollout in a range of transformative directions. But it was the next chancellor—after Chopp’s tenure was cut short by illness—who nurtured the innovative shape this transformation would take.

In 2021, Chancellor Jeremy Haefner described the 4D vision this way: “DU is rebooting the student experience by retaining the engagement students yearn for while being intentional about the skills they need to build lives of purpose.”

Through a holistic approach to learning and personal development, the 4D Experience identifies four interconnected dimensions for student evolution: intellectual growth, purpose-driven careers, well-being, and character exploration.

Laura Perille, Executive Director of the 4D Experience, collaborated with campus partners to create a taxonomy and build out what these dimensions would mean. “What are the habits of thinking and doing associated with each of these dimensions to help people understand how they were already mapping to this work in their pedagogy and practice, but then also initiate conversations around, how can we further advance this work?” she says.

The program challenges conventional achievement-based educational models by prioritizing reflection, mentorship, and practical application alongside academic prowess—noteworthy, for a R1-ranked doctoral institution. Through its innovative framework, DU nurtures graduates to emerge equipped not only for professional success but for meaningful and fulfilling lives. With an intentional, co-curricular environment, the 4D Experience guides students to connect the dots of passion and purpose, building their educational pathways alongside mentors. Those mentors, advisors, and peers become a new student’s “constellation of support,” based on their unique interests, needs, and goals.

“Why a holistic, 4D experience? Because we want our students to have lives of purpose and careers of fulfillment, and we want them to be servants of the public good,” wrote Chancellor Haefner in his Spring 2021 message. “But the world is complicated. Climate change, increasing wealth inequity and injustice are pervasive challenges. Students need more than just a great intellectual and academic journey; they also need experiences from which they can build comprehensive life skills. This is what the 4D experience aspires to deliver.”

1. Advancing Intellectual Growth

At the heart of the 4D Experience is the belief that intellectual growth is more than a measure of academic performance. It is about fostering curiosity, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary connections that prepare students to navigate complex global challenges.

DU’s First-Year Seminar (FSEM) program was an existing program and opportune environment to introduce 4D, and this dimension. These small, topic-focused seminars are designed to ease new students’ transition into college-level learning while encouraging them to think deeply about their goals and values. Heather Martin, a Writing Program instructor and FSEM faculty member, has reimagined her course to align with the new 4D framework. This approach encourages students to connect their academic pursuits with broader life questions with intention from day one.

“My seminar focuses on transitions, both personal and academic. We use texts like Bruce Feiler’s Life Is in the Transitions and Stanford’s Designing Your Life to think about how we experience transitions,” Martin explained. “What are ways we can reflect and process our transitions and be intentional going forward? It’s a real complement to how we welcome students into the DU community. And it also sets up the conversations that will be incorporated in the course content in different ways throughout the campus.”  

One of the tools DU employs to enhance intellectual growth is the e-portfolio system. Students create digital portfolios that document their learning, track their progress across disciplines, and showcase their academic achievements. They can be shared with faculty for assessments and provide a platform to display their skills to an external audience, such as a job interviewer. The portfolios encourage students to see their education as a whole rather than a collection of disconnected courses. “It’s integrated learning framed around the four dimensional experience as buckets to integrate learning,” says Martin. “It’s really exciting to see them thinking with more intentionality about their college experience.”

The program challenges conventional achievement-based educational models by prioritizing reflection, mentorship, and practical application alongside academic prowess.

Beyond the classroom, DU offers a range of high-impact practices designed to deepen intellectual engagement. Internships, research opportunities, and study abroad programs enable students to apply their learning in real-world contexts. “Across the arc of educational experiences, we look at the kinds of moments that may already be pre-existing, where we can build out additional touch points that are engaging students in conversations about practical applications of their studies,” says Perille.

DU’s commitment to intellectual growth extends to its faculty as well. Professional development workshops provide instructors with tools to incorporate reflective practices and interdisciplinary learning into their teaching, and Infusion Grants support faculty and staff with seed funding for projects that enhance the 4D Experience of DU undergraduate or graduate students. “It seemed disingenuous to talk about student thriving without recognizing that faculty and staff are responsible for delivering these kinds of high impact experiences,” says Perille.

2. Pursuing Careers and Lives of Purpose

The second pillar of the 4D Experience prepares students for purposeful and fulfilling careers. By aligning academic learning with professional aspirations, DU ensures that graduates are equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern workforce. But first, it helps students reflect on their interests and values, guiding them to choose majors and career paths that align with their passions.

The Major + Career Exploration Lab, for example, is a quarterly session open to all students to help them discover strategies for matching their interests and values to potential careers, then determining the major that will best set them on that path. Are you unsure what you want to major in? asks the signup page for the event. Have you declared a major but want to confirm that it’s truly for you?

“We encourage students to think about their ‘why’—what motivates them and how they want to contribute to the world. What are the issues that animate you? What do you find yourself drawn to engage in?” Perille says. “We’re getting them to actually think about their ‘why’ as the driving force of thinking about potential careers and majors.”

When Williamson thought about what drew her engagement on campus, she targeted her experiences as a peer mentor and student coordinator. Those roles have given her valuable skills that have fueled her thinking about careers, including possibly working in higher education. “These roles have taught me leadership, organization, and problem-solving—all of which are transferable to the professional world, whatever I end up choosing to do,” she said.

DU also integrates purpose-driven learning into student employment. Through the 4D Reflective Supervision Model, supervisors help student employees connect their campus work to their broader educational and career goals. This intentional approach ensures that even part-time jobs become meaningful learning experiences. Internships, co-op programs, and community engagement opportunities further enhance students’ career readiness. These experiences provide hands-on learning while helping students build networks and explore potential career paths.

This emphasis on purpose-driven careers aligns with broader trends in education and employment, where adaptability, creativity, and emotional intelligence are increasingly valued. It also serves as DU’s answer to contemporary critics of American higher education by creating a more direct link and intentional link between areas of interest, areas of experience, choice of major, and applications of all three in the workforce.

3 Promoting Well-Being

The 4D Experience prioritizes a culture of compassion, making mental, physical, and emotional health essential components of student development alongside academic and professional success. DU built in access to resources students need to thrive, from counseling services and wellness workshops to programs in meditation, fitness, and stress management.

Faculty members like Martin also address well-being in their classrooms. “We talk openly about thriving—what it looks like, how to achieve it, and how to sustain it,” she said. By normalizing these conversations, DU reduces the stigma around mental health and fosters a supportive campus culture—and makes it less surprising when 4D topics arise in core classes. “I think sometimes it can be challenging for students who are high achieving, and they’re accustomed to a certain model of learning that they’re really good at,” she says. “I’m pushing them to think a little bit outside of that previous experience.”

In addition to being a source of academic support, peer mentors are trained to be personal and professional sources of support, and to recognize signs of stress or burnout. On the national level, peer mentorship has been linked to positively impacting student outcomes and addressing systemic barriers to success, and programs are on the rise. Just last month, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) launched a mentorship initiative, designed to support APLU member universities in developing and implementing sustainable peer mentorship models using technology-enabled solutions.

The university has also developed initiatives to support faculty and staff, recognizing that their well-being is essential to creating a thriving campus community. Workshops on topics such as compassion, collaboration, and stress management provide employees with tools to care for themselves and others.

4 Exploring Character

Character exploration is a vital dimension of the 4D Experience, encouraging students to reflect on their values, develop resilience, and cultivate a sense of purpose while navigating the complexities of modern life with integrity.

DU’s Kennedy Mountain Campus is a unique asset in the university’s toolbox that provides students a place to go—up into the woods—for targeted learning and personal character development outside the classroom. The 724-acre property, a gift from a donor, had previously been the largest Girl Scout camp in Colorado. Now part of DU’s facilities, the Kennedy Mountain Campus is home to the First Ascent Program, an immersive weekend retreat for first-year students that challenges them to step outside their comfort zones and reflect on what matters most to them. The Mountain Campus bordering Roosevelt National Forest offers opportunities for hiking, mindfulness, and community-building, encouraging students to recharge and reflect, strengthening their overall resilience, and connecting with their peers on a deeper level.

In academic settings, character exploration is woven into courses like Martin’s FSEM seminar, which includes reflective writing assignments on topics such as personal values and life philosophy. “The 4D framework makes it easier to bring these discussions into the classroom,” Martin said. “It helps students see the connections between their academic learning and their personal growth.”

Character development is also a dimension that grows out of the mentorship program. Libby Williamson, a junior and peer mentor, was so inspired by her experience, and having absorbed the character modeling by her mentor, that she applied to become a mentor herself, and eventually rose to the role of student coordinator. Mentoring peers, she explains, requires a unique set of skills. “It’s not just about giving advice—it’s about building trust and having meaningful conversations. You’re helping someone discover their own solutions rather than handing them answers.” The mentorship program also provides a space for students to develop leadership, with training in communication, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence, all of which contribute to their personal and professional growth. For Williamson, these experiences have been transformative: “Mentoring has taught me so much about empathy, patience, and the importance of listening.”

Thinking Today about the Student of the Future

When Perille and others worked to build out the 4D Experience from its pilot stage, they wanted to make sure it reached across all sectors of the campus, and that it be more than a program—something more ingrained, as a shared philosophy.

“We were always thinking, how do we do this at scale in a way that doesn’t exist just in one program, but becomes part of the ethos of the institution? How are we advancing culture change in this vein of holistic student learning and development?” she recalls.

One goal is to generate widespread buy-in, creating a shared language. That would indicate more than a collection of people participating in a program; it would be a community creating a prototype for the student of the future. 

“Ultimately, I would say my role is more than curriculum, or education,” says Perille. “It’s one of change management.”

Influencers for Life

Posted on by Dana Humphrey

In a new series for LearningWell, we ask a variety of college graduates, of different backgrounds, ages, and professions, “What experience or person in college most influenced your development as a human being?”  Our aim is to share stories that show the different influences that shape people’s lives during their education and as they navigate the process of becoming adults.  In doing so, we hope to gain insight and guidance, whether it’s identifying common themes or abandoning long-held beliefs.  

We hope that you, as readers, ask yourselves the same question.  For me, it was an invitation from a fellow student to join a group traveling to New York City to attend a meeting of what is now called the Young Democrats of America. I was a freshly minted political science major immersed in the required curriculum when I found myself off campus with peers who were discussing the direction of the country during the Reagan era. When the conversation turned to me, I spoke up, despite my shyness and the fact that my knowledge on the subject was largely limited to political theory. But something about that experience made me think  “I am someone who is politically active.”  It remains part of who I am today.

We start our series with Richard Miller, President Emeritus of Olin College of Engineering and the founding director of the Coalition for Transformational Education. Miller has dedicated his career to strengthening and expanding higher education’s influence on personal formation and is fond of saying  “A good education changes what you know.  A great education changes who you are.”

Richard Miller and Mel Ramey

LW: “What experience or person in college most influenced your development as a human being?” 

There are several people throughout my education that shaped who I am as a person, but the most relevant is Professor Melvin R. Ramey of the University of California at Davis, where I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in 1971. Mel and I arrived at UC Davis at the same time, in the fall of 1967. He had just finished his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and was a new assistant professor of civil engineering, and I was just enrolling in college, having graduated from Tranquillity Union High School in June of that year. I was assigned to Mel Ramey as my faculty advisor, and I was in his first cohort of student advisees.

Mel was the second  African American faculty member at UCD. While this had some relevance to his personal faculty responsibilities, this had very little effect on me. What was much more significant was the fact that Mel had been a nationally competitive athlete at Penn State in two sports (basketball and track and field), was simultaneously an athletic coach and faculty representative to the NCAA at UCD. Mel coached track and field and several of his mentees won national medals for their performance. While this might seem irrelevant, it is central to his impact on my life and career.

He changed my life and contributed to my lifelong commitment to student wellbeing.

I grew up on a farm with almost no one in my extended family on either side who went to college. Our rural high school did not even offer calculus (and only occasionally offered a weak course in physics) which are both the prerequisites for engineering. About half of our student population at TUHS were migrant farm laborers. While I graduated #2 in my class and got into UCD, Mel knew I was not prepared.  He did, however, see potential in me and drove me to take the most challenging classes which eventually prepared me for a fellowship to MIT for my Master’s degree. I would never have made this journey without his inspiration.

Mel understood that to be an effective teacher you need the same mindset and motivations as a coach. To him, these were essentially identical. A coach takes responsibility for inspiring and mentoring each athlete in his care to achieve their full potential. This can at times involve invasive questions, pushing you when appropriate, and supporting you when appropriate, and never letting you give up. He certainly did this for me and was such an important part of my life that although I changed majors 5 times as an undergraduate (and I did not graduate in civil engineering) I retained Mel Ramey as my undergraduate advisor. My respect for Mel was such that I would rather die than disappoint him.

Mel’s interest in me was authentic and permanent. His values and his example were widely recognized among many students at UCD. His example inspired me to want to pursue a Ph.D. and become a faculty member. I learned so many important life lessons from Mel. For example, every time you walk into a classroom and pick up a piece of chalk, you are not just teaching engineering principles; you are also shaping the attitudes, behavior and beliefs of the students in your class. Later, I learned many other UCD students and athletes were similarly inspired by Mel. One of his former students was a 3-time Olympic medalist in long jump. At a public ceremony in Mel’s honor, he credited Mel with always filling him with joy and wisdom and helping him become all that he is today. While he never shared with me the personal hardships he may have faced due to his race (our conversations were never about him), his life inspired optimism, hard work, and resilience. He changed my life and contributed to my lifelong commitment to student wellbeing .

We became good friends. He visited me in Iowa, after I became Dean of Engineering there, and played ping pong in the basement with our daughters.  I Invited him to be a member of the President’s Council when I was at Olin and we taught a course together in structural analysis and design when he took a sabbatical to Olin about a decade ago.

Mel’s family also remained close. His wife, Felicenne, who recently passed away, was Dean of the Business School at Sacramento State University, and his daughter, Daina Ramey Berry, has become Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UC Santa Barbara, where I began my career on the faculty in 1975. She has sought my mentorship from time to time as a form of “full circle” payback and a way for me to honor her father’s contributions to my life.  Mel passed away from brain cancer a few years ago. This memorial/obituary posted on the UC Davis website, available here is a fitting tribute to a remarkable person whose life greatly impacted my own.