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, 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 “empower youth to become changemakers by building their creative confidence and lighting the path into the realm of unknown possibilities”.

Third, I am working to embed the UIF program within Sophia University. 2020 was our first time to participate with a team of four students. For the 2021 cohort, we have put together 2 teams of 8 students in total, and we have gathered provisional administration and financial support. I am working with Fellows, faculty and administration to increase our initiatives’ visibility and garner the necessary long-term support for the program. I am convinced that this will act as a magnet for like-minded students, faculty and staff to come together and work on existing and new initiatives.

My long-term vision is to scale up the Horizon experience by creating an ecosystem that enables students to acquire the design-thinking mindset and skills to identify, develop and test solutions to real-life problems. The aim is to help students build the confidence they need to take a leap of faith and act upon their passion and ideas for social impact.

We are living in fast-changing and uncertain times that require flexibility not only in terms of skills and approach, but, more importantly, in the mindset with which we approach our challenges6. As Albert Einstein famously put it, we cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. Providing the space for students to learn experientially7 while in college is imperative not only for developing their ethical responsibility, individual confidence and resilience, but also their mental habit of thinking “outside the box” and collaborating with others to create a sustainable and desirable future for all8 .

In sync with its long-established tradition of contributing to the internationalization of Japanese education, Sophia University has become the first9 Japanese university whose students have joined Stanford University d.school’s expanding global network of design-thinking Fellows who are being the change they wish to see in their own communities. It is my strong belief that support for more of Sophia’s students to access the spaces and skills that help them to define their own goals and self-design their student journey experience will not only allow them to self-empower, but will also enable them to inspire their peers and bring deeply meaningful contributions to their communities, in their Alma Mater’s spirit of “Men and Women for Others, with Others.”