SELF-DESIGN YOUR STUDENT JOURNEY EXPERIENCE “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” - Max Planck By Magdalena Ionescu Faculty of Liberal Arts, Faculty of Law, Sophia University Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate
Do you remember your first year of college? The anticipation, with its exhilarating mix of excitement and anxiety about the unknown? As a mother of a fivemonth-old baby at the time, I thought that my freshman year was uniquely challenging and difficult. Years of teaching experience later, I realize that in so many ways my difficulties were not really unique. Regardless of their particular circumstances, most students struggle with the transition to university life.1 Still, can you imagine how it feels to be a freshman today, in the age of dizzying change, amidst a global pandemic? While figuring things out on your own is part of the maturing process, I believe that now more than ever, the uncertainty and apprehension experienced by freshman and sophomore students require particular consideration. “Students are like missiles”, as one colleague brilliantly put it. With the appropriate “scaffolding”, they lock on and propel themselves forward to unfailingly strike their targets. Without such a focus, however, they either fail to fire at all, or fire up without any clear sense of direction.2 For the past three years, within the student organization Horizon3, I have witnessed first-hand the positive impact that such “scaffolding” (through one-on-one coaching and mentorship, as well as team-building and teamwork) has in helping students focus their attention and energies on formulating self-defined goals they find meaningful and worth pursuing4. In early 2019, 1 2 3 4 5
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a group of like-minded students joined hands to create this safe space where they could identify and explore their passions, as well as learn new skills and build a community of trust and mutual support. In my mind, Horizon represents a “proof of concept” which I am currently working to expand within Sophia and beyond. There are three aspects to my work in this sense. First, the Changemaker Learning Journey (CLJ) project within Horizon. For the past eight months, we have been reflecting on our own journey and working to develop a “template” to use as “scaffolding” for new Horizon members as well as non-members who are embarking on a similar journey of self-discovery and growth into changemakers for social impact. This template addresses issues like purpose-finding, vision-formulation, goal-setting, prioritization, standards for success and professionalism, support system as well as team building and teamwork. Second, I have been working with another group of students trained in design thinking at Stanford and the HPI School of Design Thinking in Germany, to expand their knowledge and experience to a wider audience within the Sophia community and beyond. They are one of the groups to “take off’ from the Horizon platform, growing their changemaker seed into an independent organization called RISE5 that seeks to
Oliver Kress explains this difficulty in terms of the human cognitive system’s need for adaptation to environments it has never before experienced and for which, therefore, it has no assimilation and accommodation technique available. Kress, Oliver (1993) “A new approach to cognitive development: ontogenesis and the process of initiation”, Evolution and Cognition 2: 319-332. Hill, Patrick et al. (2011) “Change You Can Believe In: Changes in Goal Setting During Emerging and Young Adulthood Predict Later Adult Well-Being”, Soc Psychos Personal Sci 2(2): 123-131. Horizon homepage: www.horizon-japan.org To date, the Horizon “incubator” has enabled various projects to “hatch”: Fempowerment, CocoEco, Refugee Support Group, RISE, Blind Truth, Itoshima Ocean Pollution Project. RISE homepage: https://rebrand.ly/rise2021
