Category: Teaching & Learning

Bucknell University President John Bravman personifies the saying “the harder you work, the luckier you are” and imparts that message to his students. With humility and humor, the career academic brings us through the key milestones in his life, from working to overcome a speech impediment as a child to being the “smart kid” in New York City public schools to his spectacular, yet uneven, success at Stanford, where he learned to be a great teacher well before he became a college president.    

Here is an excerpt from our interview:  

LW: To start, can you give a bit of background about yourself, your family, how you grew up, your education? From what I understand already, you have a very interesting story.

Bravman: Well, I doubt I do. But I grew up in New York City 67 years ago. I’m a first generation college student—second generation American but first in my family to go away to college. So my father was in World War II, and I grew up with parents from the postwar era, and I came of age in the early sixties. My earliest distinct memory is probably Kennedy being assassinated. So that’s the place in time. And everything that happened in the sixties influenced me somehow, some way. I had a love of science. My father was an accountant, but he liked science, too, and I probably picked it up from him. But things like going to the World’s Fair in ’64 and ’65 and going to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, these were all big deals for me. And sure enough, I became a scientist.

LW: Where in the city were you educated?

Bravman: P.S. 34 Queens. Then I moved to Long Island for junior high and high school and went to public schools there, too. But it was quite a culture shock, moving from the city to the suburbs. It was just different. I’m sure there’s a lot of sociology and psychology and history and economics to explain why. We were not a wealthy family by any means, but we were never hungry. And for whatever reason, I grew up with the notion that smarter is better—that it’s good to be smart and work hard and all that kind of stuff. And probably, because I moved during those preteen-teenage years, when I went out to Long Island, it was all of a sudden, “Who’s better looking? Who has nicer clothes? Who’s more popular?” This was not a wealthy place, but just all of a sudden, it changed. I remember thinking about that but realizing, of course, that smart still mattered, and I had to do well in school and all that. But that was the first big cultural shock I experienced in my life.

LW: When you say being smart matters, and you saw that as a pathway to success, would you say your peers in the NYC public schools seemed to share that perspective more so than those in Long Island, who seemed more socially-oriented?

Bravman: Probably not. But my honest answer is that, from kindergarten through fifth grade, it felt like the extent to which you were looked up to by your peers came down to who is the smartest kid in class. And that felt very different on Long Island.

But I mean, I spent seven years on Long Island at three different schools, all public. And then I had the incredible good fortune of going to Stanford, where I ended up spending 35 continuous years. Believe it or not, I’ve often said that one of the best things that ever happened to me was a rejection. And I’ve reflected on that rejection throughout my life. I desperately wanted to go to MIT from high school because I’m a sciencey, nerdy geek. And that’s what you did if you grew up on the east coast. That’s where I could be the best of the best. Everyone knows MIT. And if you’re on the west coast, you went to Caltech.

But the story there is that a friend of mine in high school, who was also a nerdy kid, took a family vacation to California the summer after our junior year in high school. He came back with tales of these redwood trees, which I’d only seen in National Geographic, and the Pacific Ocean in Monterey Bay. I’d never been west of Pennsylvania. He told me about a school I’d never heard of called Stanford University, and he said, “We have to go there. It’s amazing.”

And of course, there was no internet back then. So I went down to the high school library, where we had a room forcollege books, and it turns out the Stanford Viewbook was missing. So I didn’t even see pictures of Stanford. All they had was their course catalog, which back then was just text. I illegally took that book home for the night because you’re supposed to leave them there. And I went through it, and I was so entranced by this book with no pictures that I designed my whole curriculum only to find out later that what I thought I was going to take were all junior-level classes, not freshman classes. Long story short, I did not get into MIT, but I got into Stanford, and my friend did not get into Stanford, where he really wanted to go. He went to MIT, was miserable, and dropped out.

I’m just saying, I’ll never, ever forget that rejection and the lesson of, “Okay, life knocks you down? You just keep going.”

LW: With that course catalogue, did you recognize the rigor of the courses right away? What attracted you to the curriculum?

Bravman: Well, I love books. Most of the books I own have nothing to do with science and engineering. I’ll have a real problem when I retire because I’ve now collected 5,000 books, and I have no place to put them. So honestly, I think I just liked this course catalog. It was words, and I had never read a course catalog. I remember sitting in my bedroom, reading page after page of these course descriptions. I thought, “This is amazing, and I want to learn all this stuff.” And then I went off to college for 20 years. 

LW: You must have been quite wowed, then, because your friend was not kidding—it is beautiful.

Bravman: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s like 362 days a year of perfect weather. I’d never been on a plane before. And back then, Stanford had arranged charter planes from several cities on the east coast, so I was on a plane with 250 kids going to Stanford. I showed up on campus, and it was just the most amazing thing. I had a lot of financial aid. It included loans, scholarships, and a work requirement. So I was assigned to work in a kitchen. I probably picked that off a list. I liked to cook, even as a boy. But I remember we got to campus late, and within minutes of entering my dorm, someone came and told me that I was late for work because as a brand new freshman, I was supposed to work the first day on campus in the kitchen, helping make dinner. So I showed up, and Kay Malik, who was the head of the food service in Wilbur Hall at Stanford, she said, quite curtly, “You’re late for work. Don’t do it again.” So I didn’t exactly have a perfect start.

I loved Stanford. But the fact of the matter is I almost flunked out my sophomore year because I was not prepared for the rigor of the academic work. I quite honestly never really studied in high school because I didn’t have to. I had one B in ninth grade art. So I did not graduate with a perfect 4.0. So I graduated second in my class. My friend, who went to MIT, was one of six people with a 4.0. So I was technically ranked number seven, but I’ve always liked to say number two.

LW: What was it like to have been close to the smartest in your class in high school and then become average, or maybe even struggling to be average, in college?

Bravman: Well, I’d never met kids who went to private schools before. So I was dealing with that and people who went to Beverly Hills High, which is a public school but a very, very good one, resourced differently than my schools were. I don’t remember too much about that, but I remember being scared and disappointed in myself. I thought, “What am I going to do and what am I going to tell my parents?” And I’m sure kids today feel the same way. And they probably also experience certain emotions I didn’t. So I’ve tried to be a better and more sensitive advisor academically, but also as a boss, understanding that people have a variety of experiences. But I think that near failure was a really important learning lesson for me. And part of that is, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” 

That’s also where I learned about advising. My advisor was an almost brand new professor at Stanford from Great Britain. He went to Cambridge. And so I learned a lot along the way, too, about England as a result of that relationship. But he was helpful and supportive, and I’ve never forgotten that. So obviously I didn’t flunk out, and I did well enough, and I ended up getting into the doctoral program there in engineering. 

When I started the doctoral program, my undergraduate advisor remained my advisor, but I also got a second advisor in electrical engineering, a different department. My department, material science, announced a new faculty search. And I remember saying to my advisor in electrical engineering, “Hey, look, did you see my department’s going to be hiring someone else? I wonder who they’re going to get.” And he looked at me and said, “I want you to apply for it.” I said, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not going to be a Stanford professor. Give me a break. I almost flunked out.” He said, “No, I want you to apply for it.” And he was an older professor. He’s still with us. He’s 85 and a giant in his field. He was a giant in his field then, and he said, “I want you to stay.”

So that advice and encouragement from two different advisors changed the course of my life. That whole advising experience has meant so much to me ever since because I know what it did for me. I ended up staying there for a total of 35 years before coming here to Bucknell in 2010. I lived off campus one year in graduate school and three years as a young professor. So 31 of 35 years, I lived on campus. And for 14 of those years, I think it is, I lived in an undergraduate dorm as what we call a “resident fellow.” So most of my life, I’ve lived on a college campus. So I went to college 50 years ago next September.

When I say it made my life, I mean, I’m not kidding. And obviously it took a lot of hard work—first to not get kicked out, secondly to get a position in the graduate program, and then to pass my Ph.D. qualifying exam, which I failed the first time and you only can take twice by policy. So I worked my butt off and passed the second time. And then I had to get on faculty, and then I had to earn tenure. And that is not trivial at university, let me tell you. Stanford’s policy is that you have to be one of the two best people in the world at your age in your field. And that’s not possible, really, but that’s the written standard. And of course, Stanford School of Engineering is incredibly famous in my area because of Silicon Valley. So I had the combination of thrills and chills every single day, and getting tenure was probably the achievement of my life until I became president here.

And I just reflect on that—to have gotten there as a first generation college kid, who almost flunked out and then didn’t pass his Ph.D. qualifying exam the first time. And I’m no genius, not even remotely close, but I know the value of working really hard and keeping a dream ahead of you and sacrificing. In my experience, working really hard is no guarantee, but it can make a difference. I’ve tried to be very sensitive to students who are struggling. Maybe they wouldn’t believe a college president almost flunked out of school. But it’s the God’s honest truth, and I want them to know that. And being an advisor doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover. You can be direct and strong without being strident, and you can be understanding of someone’s needs and foibles and weaknesses. And I can’t believe in September, I will have literally been in college for 50 years.

“[As an advisor] you can be direct and strong without being strident, and you can be understanding of someone’s needs and foibles and weaknesses.”

LW: That’s a great milestone. So when you almost failed, who was it that believed in you enough to keep you going?

Bravman: That’s a great question. It’s hard to answer. Obviously, my advisor’s support and some other faculty were important. But I did realize that I’d have to get my stuff together, or my life’s going to be very different.

LW: So you had a strong sense of agency.

Bravman: I was probably more scared shitless than anything else. I really was, and I was afraid of disappointing my parents, for sure. So I was in the process of applying to transfer to a couple schools back east—good but lesser schools—and not even thinking about, “Are they really going to take someone who’s almost flunked out?” Thankfully, I didn’t have to find out, but I learned that you can talk yourself quickly into procrastinating, and it usually doesn’t have a good end. So I learned that lesson painfully and learned that I had to discipline myself to partition the various aspects of life—fun and work and this and that—and to sleep as little as possible to maximize everything else. That’s probably the best answer I can give you, but I was really scared.

LW: Let’s talk about when you were recommended for, and ultimately earned, that coveted teaching position. You hadsomeone who really believed in you. What did that feel like?

Bravman: You know, all the prejudices about research institutions are often true. But this advisor, he was both at the absolute top of his field and the best teacher I ever had. That was a role model for me. And honestly, a lot of getting that job was just dumb luck—right person, right time. And I, in my naivete, just thought, “Gee, I wonder who they’re going to get.” It never entered my mind that I’d be on the Stanford faculty. And he just said, “John, I want you to apply.” And I don’t remember much else, but saying some quip about, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not like you. I can’t be you.” And now I’m one of two people in Stanford’s history to have their highest award for teaching and their highest award for service.

LW: What about the teaching? What do you think, given all you’ve told me, contributed to you being a great teacher?

Bravman: Well, I’ll tell you, I have a story there, too. It’s the same answer: total, utter fear of failure. My brother is older than me. He’s very outgoing. My sister’s younger and very outgoing, and I was the introvert. And my father was a very, very smart man. It’s such a shame he couldn’t go to college. I grew up with a speech impediment, and my father, when I was in second grade, bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder—which I still have and still works—and a microphone. And he made me read into the tape, and he made me listen to myself, which is painful to this day. But he wanted me to learn to overcome my speech impediment. And I never forgot that because I grew up just incredibly fearful of speaking in front of any crowd, all through college. And in part, that’s why I failed my Ph.D. qualifying exam.Because it’s oral the first time. It’s two-and-a-half hours in front of 10 professors. So I was scared out of my mind. Andsome of my speech issues, when you’re scared, they come to the fore. 

Fast forward to teaching, having had lots of not-so-great teachers at Stanford, as well as some great ones, I knew which I wanted to be. So when I started teaching, I probably prepared 10 to 12 hours per one hour lecture. We had, early on, a video camera in our department and a VHS machine. This was pretty advanced at the time. So I remember at midnight when the building was empty, videotaping myself, giving my low-level introductory material science lectures to an empty room on videotape and then watching it until two o’clock in the morning, learning what I did wrong. I was so scared of failure, and I really wanted to be a good teacher. The fact is, I have eight teaching awards,two of them national. So I like telling people who have these issues, honestly, if you knew my fear of talking in public and now I can stand in front of arbitrarily large and loud crowds, anyone can. 

The fact is I’m still a deep introvert. I don’t actually believe in fundamental change that way. You overcome and you adapt. I’m proud of what I did in teaching, and I think I’m a reasonably good public speaker now. I’m not very good at reading a script. But I want students who are struggling, especially with public speaking, but anything really, to know that if I can do this, believe me, you can.

LW: Well, you can’t win all those teaching awards without getting a positive response from the students themselves. They really are the ultimate judges on this. Do you have a sense of what about your teaching has resonated so muchwith students?

Bravman: I became a techno geek in terms of computers, as they arose. So the Macintosh 1984 came out the same year I joined the faculty, and everyone was using IBM PC. Those were released in 1980, but I started with a Mac. I was, for the most part, a bit ahead of my time with new software, new technology, and I took that into the classroom. So I think that was noticed.

I think it helps to be friendly and approachable and tell stories, like, “Hey, here’s my story. If I can do this, you can do this.” And hopefully I gave clear lectures. My department had very few majors. The big undergraduate courses were all kind of service courses. And so people didn’t really want to be in my classroom, but they had to be. And so that’s something to think about. And then at the graduate level, I ended up teaching things that, for the most part, very few people fundamentally like. They just have to do it as a doctoral student. Like crystallography, it’s very dry and not very exciting. So I worked hard at bringing in real life examples that people could relate to that still allowed me to explicate on the subjects. And so it’s those kinds of sensitivities, but also being in my office at midnight. Students would come see me at midnight because that’s more their hours than mine.

Of course, early on, you’re younger, so you’re closer to them. But what’s the lure of academics? Every year, the freshmen are the same age. Every year, I’m exactly one year older. It’s so unfair.

LW: Did you think early on in your career that you’d ever be a college president? Was that a holy grail that you always hoped to achieve?

Bravman: No. My dream job, having grown up in New York City, was to be the president of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. The woman who was the president there was president for like 25 years. And I remember thinking, “Would you please just retire?” But seriously, being a college president is a tough job. And it always has been. But I’m who I am, and I’m not who I’m not, and I can only do what I do. So I just keep building as best I can.

At a Boston College retreat, sophomores are asked three questions: What are you good at? What brings you joy? Who does the world need you to be? The exercise is part of a program called “Half-time” meant to help students begin a lifelong process of vocational discernment. For Jesuit universities such as BC, this type of formative education, defined as “educating whole persons for lives of meaning and purpose,” is part of the fabric. It is now the focus of a new academic department at BC called the Department of Formative Education (DFE). 

The department extends BC’s leadership in formative education, expanding the focus from the practice of undergraduate education to research on “life-wide and lifelong” formative education. Housed within the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, DFE features an undergraduate major (Transformative Educational Studies), a master’s program (Learning, Design, and Technology), and the first ever Ph.D. program in Formative Education.

“Our programs tackle big formative issues,” said Chris Higgins, the Department’s founding chair. “How can we nurture vision and values? What are the dispositions that sustain democracy? How do we co-evolve with technological tools? How can we cultivate a sustainable relationship to the earth? What does it mean to flourish as a human being?” 

Such questions, Higgins explained, demand an interdisciplinarity approach, spanning anthropology, design thinking, history, the learning sciences, philosophy, and the psychological humanities.

Stanton Wortham is the inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School. An anthropologist by training, Wortham spent several years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with scholars of varying disciplines within the liberal arts on how their expertise applied to education. When he arrived at BC, he was able to continue this work of integrating the liberal arts into scholarly inquiry on education, with the blessing of BC President Father Leahy. In creating the new department within the Lynch school at BC, Wortham was inspired by the Jesuit reverence for the liberal arts and its emphasis on formative education.  

“Most of our education ignores the multi-dimensional nature of how people learn,” he said. “Formative education is this notion that people have several different types of development—social, emotional, ethical, spiritual—and all of those things are going on in a young person’s life at the same time.”  

“Most of our education ignores the multi-dimensional nature of how people learn.”

Wortham believes the optimum form of human development is when all these dimensions are aligned—a state he refers to as “wholeness.” The other two pillars of formative education are purpose, which helps young people explore what will bring them both meaning and a living; and community, the recognition that this discernment about life’s purpose happens together with others. Character and ethics are naturally woven in.  

“Too often at an institution, we tell young people that if they just learn a lot of stuff and get a good job, then everything is going to be fine. And it’s just not true if you’re not connected to something that has bigger meaning,” said Wortham. “We can’t tell students what to believe, but it is our job to help them ask questions about what is ultimately important to them.”

Wortham envisioned a department known both for its research and its teaching. He wanted to convene a group of liberal arts faculty that would bring diverse disciplinary perspectives to the study of formative experience, practice, and aims. This research on holistic development then enriches courses aiming to inspire students to think about education in this formative way.  

To lead the department, Wortham recruited Higgins, a philosopher, who had been leading the Transformative Education Studies program (TES). Now part of the Department of Formative Education, TES is growing with 95 majors to date. “‘Transformative education’ names both what we study and how we study,” Higgins explained.

“Our courses explore questions about personal and social transformation. Questions such as, what does it mean to be an educated person? And what kind of schools do we need in a democratic society? At the same time, we want these classes themselves to be transformative experiences, spaces where our students can reflect on their own efforts to form themselves into somebody who can lead a flourishing life.” 

Higgins shares Wortham’s perspective that education has grown too narrow and instrumental. His recent book, Undeclared, calls out the contemporary university, with its “credentialing mindset,” for paying only lip service to the idea of general education. Far from being encouraged to explore, students get the message that they had better “pick a lane and step on the gas!” Instead, he offers a vision for an educational renaissance in which “soulcraft,” described as “the quest to understand, cultivate, and enact ourselves in lives worth living,” is the primary focus.  

Higgins’ creative energy is reflected in the department itself, down to its name which he said is intentionally ambiguous. “Formative education is open for interpretation,” he said. “I don’t want to determine the kinds of questions that my colleagues want to explore.” 

Those questions are wide-ranging and include topics one might not immediately think of. Professor Marina Bers studies how children can develop ethically and interpersonally through engagement with coding and robotics. Caity Bolton, a cultural anthropologist, is studying what holistic human and social development looks like through Islamic education in East Africa and the Arab World. DFE affiliate faculty member Belle Liang has developed a “purpose app” for college students.  

Just in its second year, the DFE doctoral program is already producing notable research. For example, Ph.D. student Harrison Mullen has received a grant from the N.C.A.A. to study the experience of athletes forced to retire from the sport that has been so central to them. Framing the issue in formative terms, Mullen considers how practices such as sports help us make sense of what it means to lead a worthwhile life. In interviews with retired athletes, he explores the deep sense of loss that accompanies this life transition.

At the Department of Formative Education, as at BC overall, personal reflection is fundamental. “It’s the Jesuit thing,” said Higgins. “We are devoted to careful study of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’—but we also never forget the ‘why’ and the ‘who.’ Why does this matter? And how does this help you understand who you are and what you stand for? 

Higgins offered examples of TES courses and their activities. “In ‘The Educational Conversation,’ we invite students to reflect on their key formative influences through an educational autobiography. In ‘Spiritual Exercises,’ we introduce students to a range of spiritual practices, starting with the exercises devised by the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola.”

For Wortham and Higgins, the time is ripe to reconsider the hyperfocus on academic achievement. They believe educators in a variety of settings are looking for a richer, formative language to describe their practices and aims. To this end, the Lynch School is launching the Transformative Education Lab, which will share research and best practices around whole-person education. Wortham and Higgins hope that the lab will extend Boston College’s leadership in formative education to new audiences, helping to recenter questions of meaning and value in educational debates. 

“Academic achievement is critical. Subject matter knowledge is critical,” said Wortham. “But these students we are teaching and testing are people. We need to consider their mental health, how they will build relationships with others—all the things that make them thrive as human beings.”

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.”

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.

A conversation with Holly White, doctoral candidate at the University of Maine, and lead author of the recent PNAS Nexus article, Cultivating long-term well-being through transformative undergraduate education. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Eric Mazur gives lots of talks on how to teach. 

Often, he starts with a quiz, which goes something like this:

Think about a skill you’re really good at. Something you’re proud of — that other people respect you for.

OK, now try to remember how you got good at that skill.

Was it trial and error?

Practice?

Hearing lectures?

Getting an apprenticeship?

“Nobody chooses lectures,” says Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard. “Nobody, nobody, nobody chooses lectures. Then I show a picture of me lecturing — an old one, because I don’t lecture anymore — and I say: ‘Don’t we have a problem here?’”

It’s a problem Mazur has been trying to tackle for more than thirty years, ever since he realized that lectures — which are the classic way that physics is taught —aren’t actually that effective at teaching physics.

That realization came in the early 90s, after Mazur read an article in The American Journal of Physics about professors who gave thousands of students an unusual test. The test lacked textbook jargon and fancy equations. Instead, it used simple language to ask about basic physics principles, like the magnitude of the force that’s exerted when a light car collides with a heavy truck. 

When the students took the test, they did poorly — even students with award-winning teachers. Mazur was shocked. Could his students at Harvard do better? He hoped they would.

But they didn’t. Which is when he started to question the whole idea of lecturing. He realized that students who simply hear information from a talking head might not effectively learn that information. 

Of course, as a student, Mazur had been lectured to, as have generations of students, stretching back centuries. But suddenly, that started to seem like a terrible mistake.

At the time, Mazur was coming up for tenure at Harvard — normally, not a moment when one might adopt a side project. But he thought he might return to Europe (he’s Dutch), so tenure took on less importance than it might have otherwise. So he dug in and started to rethink teaching. He wanted to create a classroom where students were more engaged, and really, deeply absorbed the material.

As Mazur knew from his own life, engagement is key to having a meaningful experience in higher education. When he was a teenager, Mazur dreamed of being an astronomer. “And then at age 17, I enrolled at the University of Leiden, which was the mecca for astronomy. And within six weeks, my whole childhood dream unraveled. The courses were so badly taught.”

At the University, astronomy had little to do with the majesty of the universe. “It was just a jumble of formulas,” Mazur recalls. “And the whole big picture disappeared. It disintegrated. So I dropped out and became a physicist, because I knew I was reasonably good at physics in high school.”

But within a few weeks, Mazur realized that the quality of physics instruction wasn’t a whole lot better. “Which is why it’s so ironic that when I started teaching, I fell into the trap of doing what my instructors had done.”

Why perpetuate the cycle? Part of the reason, Mazur says, is that we don’t focus nearly enough on optimizing the classroom experience for students. We need to ask whether students feel challenged and supported. How much are they really learning? How deeply are they connected to their professors? For Mazur, having a doctoral advisor who cared about him made a huge difference in his life. 

Indeed, those sorts of connections make a big difference for lots of people. As the 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index revealed, the happiness of college graduates was not particularly correlated with whether they attended a public or private school, a small or large school, or a selective or not-too-selective school. Instead, researchers found, “if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being.”

You could argue, too, that deeply understanding physics or history or geometry greatly benefits a student’s future career. When you have to design a bridge, does it matter whether you got an A in your engineering class? Or how well you truly grasp a set of core principles?

CHANGE COMES, BUT SLOWLY

In the early 1990s, Mazur started “flipping the classroom.” No longer did he dispense knowledge to a hushed room of notetakers. Instead, students read through the content (what might once have been called “lecture notes”) before class. When everyone came together, students worked in groups to figure out problems and clarify concepts. 

Mazur quickly discovered that students were often better at explaining a concept to each other than he was at explaining it to them. After all, he had learned physics long ago, and it could be hard for him to understand what might be so perplexing about, for example, Newton’s Third Law. But students who had just spent a week striving to understand it could easily relate to — and help — peers who were struggling.

Mazur’s conversion energized him — and a lot of other people. He started giving a talk called “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer,” chronicling how and why he had changed his own classroom. In 2009, after -— by his count — giving the talk about 600 times, the University of Maryland Baltimore County taped Mazur and put the talk on YouTube. He was sure that no one would ever invite him to speak on this topic again, since his views were now so easily accessible. 

Mazur quickly discovered that students were often better at explaining a concept to each other than he was at explaining it to them.

You can guess what happened next. Mazur’s speech went on to attract more than 200,000 views, and he was invited to give talks around the world on why he had stopped lecturing. Academic studies began to focus on the benefits of active learning. And Mazur penned a book, Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual.

In 2019, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “students in the active classroom learn more.” But, it soberly noted, “[d]espite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods.” 

In a recent book, Brian Rosenberg — the longtime former president of Macalester College — writes that the “evidence that lectures are an ineffective way of teaching is both voluminous and incontrovertible.” So, he asks, “given its centrality to higher education and the evidence that it does not work very well as a teaching method, shouldn’t this be something about which faculty are thinking and debating pretty regularly? Isn’t the topic worth at least a faculty meeting or two?”

Still, change doesn’t come easily to higher education, and Mazur knows it. Asked if he thought he has moved the needle through his outreach, Mazur replied, “A tiny bit… which is probably a lot compared to what has happened over the past thousand years. I think people are more and more realizing that things are broken.” He does think the needle has moved more in K-8 education, where there has been significant interest in new pedagogical approaches.

The brokenness that Mazur sees is not just a function of too much lecturing. He believes our assessment system also makes little sense. High-stakes tests should not be the main way that students are evaluated, he says. Tests encourage cramming, which has proven to be a terrible way to build long-term knowledge. 

And teachers — who generally devise the tests — are essentially evaluating their own work. As a teacher, Mazur says, “you know what you’ve presented in the class. Therefore, you know what students can answer, so they can pass the test. And most of them pass it by just rote memorization, or rote procedural problem solving… The type of skills that are tested under those circumstances have absolutely nothing to do with the skills that you need as a journalist, as a physicist, as a doctor, as a politician. It has no connection at all. It’s just like a hazing ritual almost.”

For a while, Mazur hoped the pandemic might upend education, but those hopes proved to be fleeting. “What I had underestimated,” he says, “is how badly people wanted to get back into the classroom to do what they did before.”

Still, Mazur believes that change is imminent. The rise of generative AI means that students now have extraordinarily powerful ways to do their homework instantly, to answer super tough physics questions — for example — without really understanding them.

This new technology may necessitate a radical thinking of what teaching is. It can’t simply be a search for right answers, because those are so easily accessible. Instead, homework and classwork will have to center on process, understanding, and analysis.

Artificial intelligence, Mazur argues, “is going to affect the jobs of our graduates in a way that is enormous.” He sees “anything that has to do with large-scale pattern recognition” being affected, from radiology to finance. “And therefore if we don’t adapt, we may become less relevant.”

He hopes the advent of AI will “force people to rethink the goal of higher education. And rethink not just content, which is the only thing that we’ve worried about so far, but also pedagogy and approach and assessment. How do we prepare people for an unknown future?”

Jason Weber was particularly attuned to the quiet student who sat in the very back row of the class he was leading. The student didn’t speak out, and rarely engaged. He was, as Weber recalls, very, very, shy. But this classroom wasn’t meant to be a spectator-sport environment. It was Texas Tech’s inaugural cohort of its new leader development program, designed to help students build confidence and purpose through active participation. Weber didn’t stop trying to draw him out, and slowly a relationship formed. 

About three-quarters through the semester, the student, Octavio Garza IV, approached him with surprising news.

“He said, ‘I just want to let you know that when I started this program, I didn’t really want to be here. But I just thought, maybe this would be good for me,’” recalls Weber, who in addition to being facilitator of the leader development program, is Associate Vice Chancellor-Leader and Culture Development of the Texas Tech University System. Octavio told him that his experience in this program made him decide to stick his neck out and apply for a student ambassador position, and that he had been selected.  

The following year, Weber would see Octavio in public roles around campus, staffing tables and handing out root-beer floats to new students. “This is someone who engaged with students doing things I never thought he would do,” Weber says. “Once I saw him in the hall, and I pulled him into my classroom to speak to a group about his experience with the program. He ended up standing in front of a whole room of people talking for five minutes on his experience and how beneficial it was. He had just completely come out of his shell.”              

Octavio has since graduated, and instead of following a career in law enforcement as planned, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in education while working in the admissions office for Angelo State University, part of the Texas Tech University system. “The school and that program had a huge impact on me,” he says, “and now I’d like to work in a career where I can help students make choices that will change their education, and their life.”

Texas Tech’s program for juniors, Lead Like A Ram, is now in its third year, and has become so popular that the two cohorts fill quickly. Participants meet twice a month for a two-hour learning session, with both groups overlapping over a shared dinner. The program is being piloted in different forms at other locations within the Texas Tech University System, and Weber hopes 2026 will see the launch of a version for graduate students in medicine.

Texas Tech is one of many institutions taking seriously the question, What kind of leaders does the world of tomorrow need, and how do we cultivate them? A 2021 study published by the Harvard Business School identified the top 10 leadership skills in demand for the future of work, including inclusive leadership, engaging and inspiring leadership, and leadership without formal authority. Meanwhile, a 2023 study by the National Society of Leadership and Success concluded that students today aren’t developing three essential skills most needed for the modern workplace: communication, decision-making, and leadership.

Academics and administrators interested in developing leaders through higher education have a new ally in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Known for a broad range of transformative advancements in education, the foundation expanded its classifications of institutions in higher education to include programs focusing on Leadership for Public Purpose. The foundation defines its interest in university leadership development in this way: “Effective leadership for public purpose transcends functional or instrumental leadership (i.e., personal career or political gain; or narrow business or organization outcomes), in pursuit of collective public good, including justice, equity, diversity, and liberty.”

This year marks the first cycle of the evaluations for the Carnegie Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose, with 25 U.S. institutions of higher education held up as pioneers on the national landscape of leadership development, including Rice University.

In 2015, renown venture capitalists and tech executives John and Ann Doerr—both Rice alums with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering—decided to make a major investment in leadership at their alma mater. Earlier contributions established their investment in engineering leadership, and they wanted to make it available to students throughout the university.

The Doerr Institute for New Leaders is the result of their $50 million gift designed to empower students with the skills, training, and confidence to make a true difference in the world, through a combination of hands-on, real-world experience, and guidance from personal coaches. The institute has a wide range of programming for Rice students at no added charge: Using a combination of classroom-based learning, excursions to watch leaders in action, one-on-one leadership coaching, and group coaching, the university practices its belief that leaders aren’t born or made, they are grown.

The focus on the word leader over leadership at Rice and many other schools is a conscious one, says Ryan Brown, Managing Director for Measurement at the institute.

“Leader development is about developing the person as a leader and their capacity as a leader, their identity as a leader. When you say leadership development, you could mean the dynamic between a leader and a follower. You could mean that broader social system in place within which leadership is happening and potential leaders are being identified. But you’re getting into more organizational or system dynamics, and that’s not what we do,” he said. “Because we don’t operate within an organization where that leadership is happening in a corporate structure, for example, elevating a person. What we’re focusing on is developing each student as a leader, then we actually want our leaders to leave, want them to graduate and go out into the world and then lead there.”

“If we only helped students to see themselves as leaders, but we had actually turned them into narcissists, then that would not be a good outcome.” 

The common set of measures Doerr Institute uses in its coaching program includes leader identity—the extent to which you see yourself as a leader, feel capable of leading, competent to lead, and willing to lead. “We also include sense of purpose, self-awareness, a couple of measures of psychological wellbeing, and an intellectual humility measure, which I really like,” Brown said. Contrary to what some might think, leadership is not about decisiveness and persuasion. “If we only helped students to see themselves as leaders, but we had actually turned them into narcissists, then that would not be a good outcome.”

Intellectual humility is a concept and measurement coined by Mark Leary at Duke University, and references the degree to which people are willing to admit that they’re wrong when they’re presented with good evidence, being open to new ideas, and finding out things that they don’t already believe are, in fact, true.

“That has a lot of application just in life and leaders that seems so important today. It’s intricately combined with active listening skills and empathy and all these kinds of things, so it makes for a healthy combination of outcomes,” he says. “We measure those things before and after students go through that coaching program, and we see consistently significant increases in leader identity and self-awareness, sense of purpose, intellectual humility and reductions in psychological distress. So we have this boost in wellbeing that is kind of a good secondary effect.”

Gavin Daves is a junior at Rice, and when he joined his first program at the Doerr Institute, he was fairly certain about what he was looking for. As someone who studies operations research and statistics, he functions in the world of applied mathematics. And he is aware of the social shortcomings within STEM.

“I’d say there is a little bit more of a vacuum or like a hole in leadership within STEM. They certainly have the leadership titles available, but not as much like the soft skills, emotional intelligence skills,” he said. “Some things that we don’t get taught in our classes are areas like how to work with the group, or how to deal with conflicts, you know, issues that are dealing with people. But I think those things are also really important when we talk about STEM jobs and careers.”

In high school, Gavin actively considered what he needed to improve on as he transitioned into college. He held some leadership positions in the band and as head of the music honor society, and belonged to a small team of students engaged in an AI competition for MIT. But he suspected that he needed to better develop elements of his personality to shine in order to have impact in his roles.

“I struggled with seeming maybe a little bit robotic to some people, unrelatable, because I came across as someone who was only focusing on the job they had to do. I wanted to work on finding ways to show a little bit more personality and even more passion for the stuff I’m doing, and about to showcase a different side of me and ultimately make me a better leader,” he said.

Gavin was trying to find ways not just to tell people what to do, but also help them grow, and if they couldn’t relate to him and trust him, it was turning into a roadblock. Through the Doerr programs, particularly the one-on-one coaching, he found himself able to immediately apply work on his skills to his part-time job as a data scientist at a tax analytics company.

“I’d say I’m a natural introvert, but I find I’m able to come out of my shell when I’m talking about something I’m excited about, or encouraging people to partake in something I’ve found really beneficial. These qualities transcend leadership, listening well and dealing with conflict, and make you a more complete and better person, overall.”

Like Rice, Washington University in St. Louis has a new initiative dedicated to developing leaders, and like Rice, it came through the generosity of a visionary alum. The $20 million George and Carol Bauer Leaders Academy places values-based leadership development at the center of the university for all students, building on the philanthropy of previous gifts supporting pockets of leadership—for Danforth Scholars, and the business school.

The Academy, still in its first year, will support research and oversee student leadership programs across schools and all ages of students in co-curricular programs, imbuing them with the best practices in leadership development and personal character formation. It also benefits the campus community with workshops, faculty grants, professional coaching, and a campus-wide Leadership Week.

“We look at leadership through what we call the 70-20-10 model, with 70% of your leadership development coming through experiences, 20% through mentoring and coaches, and 10% through academic coursework,” said Julia Macias, director of student leader development for the Academy. “This might be a little shocking, coming out of an academic institution, but we really think there are a lot of different ways to exercise what you’re learning and try things out and innovate what’s ultimately going to solidify their leadership development. Everyone, regardless of formal status, has the potential to influence and energize others to achieve a common goal. And so we really think about ourselves as developing people to become purpose-driven leaders of character and capability.”

Those character skills, and their wide-ranging benefits in both work and life, are a critical part of what so many students find binds disparate parts of their lives into a cohesive, values-based whole.

“Before, I didn’t think about how much being a good leader has to do with being a good person. Like, you have to work on yourself, first. And when I did my first program, they told me I should really work on my optimism and my empathy. And I was like, What does that even have to do with being a leader?” says Thara Venkateswaran, a Rice senior in ROTC headed to commission as a Naval officer in May. “But I realized that it really does, and emotional intelligence plays a huge role.”

As an executive officer, the second in command of the entire unit, she is responsible for managing 45 people, including all the freshmen. “Honestly, it’s a constant process of reflection and working on yourself. Because there is a lot of overlap between personal struggles and leadership struggles, professional and personal life. Really, everything is applicable to everything.”