It is my goal throughout this whole process to document things as they occur and to not wait until I have “all the answers”. Its a true design process where I am designing/iterating/prototyping/testing/designing/wash and repeat.

How did this start? I came up with this idea to redesign the higher education experience and wrote a proposal and gave it to my Dean. It was three pages – two about what I planned to do and the last page on why I was uniquely qualified to run this project.

See – I have long argued that events and education are the exact same. What is an event? Two or more stakeholders coming together for a common purpose. What is a class? Two or more stakeholders coming together for a common purpose – which in this case is learning/application of knowledge, skills, and abilities. If teachers were designing their courses effectively, each one would be custom created around that days learning objectives. Don’t just do a powerpoint about site selection – go do a site visit. (Also, don’t ever do powerpoints in general.) This makes [good] event planners/designers/strategists some of the most engaging and innovative teachers.

I also have a background in hospitality. Why is this relevant? We have a rule in hospitality that you should first and foremost take care of your employees. If they feel taken care of, they will take care of the guest. This isn’t just money (though being able to pay your bills is obviously important) – its a positive and empowering work environment. Your employer cares about you and your goals and ambitions and growth. They personalize and customize the job to you/your schedule/your interests as much as they can. You job craft and co-create as much as possible.

Following this rule and my experience in hospitality, it never made much sense to me why universities are almost solely concerned with the student experience. If the standard student has to have 120 credit hours to graduate, that means they are physically in the class/interacting with the teacher 1,920 hours over the course of their degree, with an additional 1,920-3,840 hours in homework and outside of class activities. That 1,920 is 80 full 24-hour days. 80 days with a teacher. [Of course, online asynchronous courses adjust this a bit…]

Yet, what I find is that most universities don’t prioritize this focus on their faculty and the faculty’s happiness. It’s not even happiness, its helping faculty grow, find their purpose, and apply their purpose. Allowing them to job craft and co-create to be a mutually beneficial experience. If the university would take care of the faculty, then the faculty would take care of the students. It wouldn’t always be a fight. People would be more engaged – at all levels.

The university eco-system has MANY stakeholders. I have decided to design the experience journeys for three of them. This includes faculty, students, and staff. The faculty and student experience journeys are being designed at the same time. I have been having SO much fun doing this!

I will detail them out more in the next few blog posts – but I am starting with doing 1:1 in-depth interviews with each faculty member individually. Yes, this takes time. But one thing I have found post-pandemic is that faculty are not only burned out, but feel like no one is listening and no one cares. This isn’t just at my school, but all the Facebook groups, all my friends at other institutions, everywhere. This is such a critical step of the process. I have conducted nearly ten 1:1 interviews lasting between 2 and 2.5 hours each. The information is RICH and the insights and ideas are brilliant. It’s going to lead to incredible things!

Concurrently, I am having my senior design students redesign the student journey. In particular this semester – they are designing the experience journey of high school seniors and college 1st years (aka freshman). They have identified 4-5 key events that happen in each of these years and then have been going through the event design canvas process to design these events to be transformation. I am so excited to share these steps in more detail later!