Cal State Stanislaus Rolls Out 7 Week Designing Your Tomorrow Course

GETTING LIFE DESIGN ESTABLISHED CAN BE A MULTI-STEP PROCESS

Bruce Hesse and Harold Stanislaw, Professors of Psychology at Cal State Stanislaus created a 7 week course called “Design Your Tomorrow”(DYT) as the second step in their evolving process of bringing life design to their campus. The first step was a couple of short, 2 hour presentations to interested faculty on their experiences at the 2017 Stanford Summer Studio for University Educators. They used those presentations to share their excitement about life design and attract interested faculty, one of whom joined them to teach the inaugural Designing Your Tomorrow class. The DYT class is meeting on Wednesdays from 4-6pm with 19 enrolled undergraduate students from a variety of majors, mostly seniors with a few juniors. The initial weeks of the course created a life design journey of design thinking activities, work ad world views, info interviewing, and positive psychology practices.  In the 5th class meeting students dug into a brainstorming activity and created three Odyssey plans. 

The final two sessions will include some short conversations with a few people outside the University to tell their career path “stories”. Most will be in-person but CS Stanislaus will also prototype using Zoom as the technology in their classroom supports videoconferencing.  (See all the monitors in the pictures).  Harold and Bruce were inspired to include these mentor visitors by the facilitators of the our tables at the Stanford Life Design Studio, and are looking forward to sharing with their students a variety of viewpoints on life, life design and the surprising windiness of career journeys.

Cal State Stanislaus's University president will be at a portion of the last class to hand out certificates of completion and join in the celebratory wrap-up.

Bruce and Harold report that they are learning much from this process and have started planning for future DYL prototypes in a variety of container formats.