THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE REIMAGINING

Emory’s Student Flourishing initiative is creating new ways for scholars to find academic, professional, and personal success.

BY KELUNDRA SMITH

Make good grades. Join a dozen clubs. Get into a top university. Land a high-paying job. Live happily ever after.

For many college students, their journeys thus far have been paved with gold stars and trophies, always chasing the next great achievement. Then, halfway through college or in many cases after graduation, they realize that there is no syllabus for how to live a fulfilling life. Finding purpose and being the best version of oneself is an intentional undertaking that unfolds daily.

As a part of Emory’s new Student Flourishing initiative, students will be given opportunities inside and outside of the classroom to reflect on who they want to be and how they want to use their intellect to make a positive impact on society.

“Investing in student flourishing at Emory is about preparing students for a lifetime of fulfillment, integrity, creativity, and service,” says Emory President Gregory L. Fenves. “We want our students to be able to answer two key questions for themselves: ‘What do I want to be?’ and ‘Who do I want to be?’ The former means using your Emory education to discover a career and postgraduate pursuits you are passionate about. The second question is even more important because it focuses on the values, sense of purpose, meaning, and inspiration that lead to a life well lived. We want our graduates to not only achieve ambitiously, but to thrive while doing so.”

“To get into a place like Emory, students are asked to stand out amongst their peers through their achievements,” says Ravi V. Bellamkonda, provost and executive vice president of academic affairs. “It’s natural that once students get to college, they continue to follow the same ‘recipe’ of proving they are smart and know how to get As. We want students to learn, to rise to challenges, and to learn new skills.”

Bellamkonda adds, “However, at Emory, we also want our students to build a muscle for reflection, to understand the real purpose and opportunity of college—to define their own path and lay the foundation for a meaningful life. The promise of the Student Flourishing initiative is that we’re intentionally nurturing the whole human being, recognizing that skills, intellect, ethics, values, and purpose need to be woven together for life to be fulfilling.”

Student Flourishing is one of the three pillars of the 2O36 campaign, and the initiative focuses on four interconnected dimensions of the student experience:

1. ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE: Innovative teaching and expanded access to all Emory has to offer

2. PROFESSIONAL PATHWAYS: Holistic career exploration and professional development

3. PURPOSE AND MEANING: Creating opportunities to reflect on questions of ethics, purpose, and meaning through the Emory Purpose Project

4. COMMUNITY AND WELL-BEING: Integrated support for health and wellness, with a culture that builds community and belonging

These four dimensions touch every part of the student journey, from undergraduate education to Campus Life. Over the past year, teams of faculty, staff and administrators across Emory have begun the work of re-envisioning and transforming how students experience their education. From major initiatives such as the Pathways Center, Emory Purpose Project, and Undergraduate Council to a range of pilot programs, courses, and improvements, new ideas are starting to roll out across the Atlanta and Oxford campuses as the Student Flourishing initiative takes root.

“Emory is one of the rare schools that is focusing on how to incorporate teaching about flourishing and teaching for flourishing on campus,” says Ira Bedzow, senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. Bedzow co-leads the Purpose Project, a cross-school Student Flourishing team focused on developing opportunities for reflective practice.

“Emory is unique because it envisions flourishing education to encompass more than just formal classroom instruction,” Bedzow continues. “The initiative is being embedded in all aspects of the student experience to ensure that such a transformational education can happen.”

Opening Doors

Amajor priority of the Student Flourishing initiative is removing barriers for students to chart their own educational futures. This includes everything from streamlining the registration process to extending the drop/add/swap deadline.

Earlier in the year, the university announced that it would eliminate needbased loans for undergraduate students with the greatest demonstrated need, replacing the loans with institutional grants and scholarships beginning this fall for the 2022–23 academic year. Expanding the Emory Advantage program removes financial barriers to flourishing.

The university is also investing in more innovative courses that bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world experiences. Over the summer, five Emory College students participated in the DataThink project in the Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods. In this experiential learning course sponsored by Microsoft, the students used data from the Atlanta Regional Commission to build a model that quantifies the metro-Atlanta rental landscape. The course marries the AI.Humanity and Student Flourishing tenets of the 2O36 campaign and serves as a model for future experiential courses.

“By ensuring greater connections between what happens in the classroom and the experiences students have beyond it, we can provide a more fully integrated educational experience,” says Joanne Brzinski, senior associate dean for undergraduate education in Emory College. “From experiential learning to more deliberate career development, the new programs and opportunities within the Student Flourishing initiative will be er prepare students for personal and professional lives of achievement, meaning, and purpose.”

Another exciting component of the Student Flourishing initiative is the opportunity to increase access to Goizueta Business School courses by creating new points of entry into the program. Historically, students who wanted to enroll in the BBA program had to wait for admission into Goizueta Business School when they achieved junior standing. Under the new BBA curriculum, students can choose to enter the program as early as the beginning of sophomore year.

Additionally, starting in January 2023, Emory College of Arts and Sciences students will have the option to pursue a minor in business in conjunction with their liberal arts major. Also, as part of the Goizueta @ Oxford program, the business school will offer pre-BBA advising, career coaching, and additional business courses to Oxford students, who constitute 15 percent of enrolled Goizueta BBA students.

Andrea Hersha er, senior associate dean of undergraduate education at Goizueta, says that the new business minor will remove barriers to business knowledge. “By giving students in the minor access to the foundational areas of business, they will learn how organizations function and how to be more effective within them,” says Hersha er. “Our intention is that liberal arts students will use the minor in order to transfer their intellectual passions into meaningful work within an applied se ing.”

More Than a Job

Thinking about how to apply liberal arts principles in industry is precisely what Branden Grimme is doing with the new Pathways Center. The Pathways Center will prepare under- graduate students for meaningful postgraduate opportunities by offering professional development, career exploration, experiential learning, mentorship opportunities, and more.

Grimme , who is the new vice provost for career and professional development and associate dean in Emory College, knows firsthand what it looks like to carve out an unconventional career path.

He is a classically trained organist with a master’s degree in theology and a PhD in education. As a person of color in higher education, he says he recognizes the barriers that may exist for students from marginalized groups. He also understands the importance of creating connections for a lasting career.

“When students come to Emory as undergraduates, they know what school is and how to be successful academically, but they do not know what a career is,” says Grimme . “They need to be taught what career management looks like and how to practice it. The Pathways Center will be instrumental in helping students understand the world of work.”

The counterpart to the Pathways Center is Oxford’s Center for Pathways and Purpose (CPP), which will launch in fall 2023. The CPP will connect opportunities at Oxford and in Atlanta as well as help students find opportunities for study abroad, internships, research, fellowships, and more.

The Pathways Center will eventually have its own physical space on campus, but for now Grimme is building a team to transform the way the university talks to students about meaningful work and their liberal arts education. “Pre-health students, for instance, need to understand how their liberal arts classes are preparing them to serve patients at the bedside,” says Grimme . “We also want to train Emory graduates to pay it forward in a way that goes beyond their own professional interests. If we do that effectively, then any Emory student who interacts with an Emory alum can potentially find a mentor.”

Finding Purpose

The path to finding a fulfilling career starts with knowing one’s purpose. Too often, people don’t think about their purpose until they are down the road in a job or relationship they dislike. The “purpose and meaning” dimension of the Student Flourishing initiative is designed to get students reflecting on who they are early.

Through the Emory Purpose Project (EPP) —among the most distinctive parts of Emory’s reimagined student experience—Bellamkonda charged a university-wide team with examining how space for reflection, defining purpose, and focusing on ethics can be created across all areas of campus. The effort is led by Emory College’s Michelle Lampl and Ed Lee III, Goizueta Business School’s Ken Keen and Emory Law’s Ira Bedzow.

In one of EPP’s first efforts to sup- port student flourishing, the Health 100 class—required for all first-year students on the Atlanta and Oxford campuses—has been reimagined to include modules focused on positive mental health, values, and character strengths, and developing one’s own health vision and goals.

Christine Whelan, the visiting “purpose professor,” will have conversations with Health 100 students about purpose and well-being. Whelan is the author of several books and courses on purpose and relationships, including her Audible guide Finding Your Purpose and the 2021 book The Big Picture.

At Oxford College, students engaged in reflective work this spring when the first full cohort of second-year students completed the one-credit Oxford Milestone class. As a part of the course, students created an e-portfolio and penned a onethousand-word essay reflecting on who they were when they started at Oxford and how their classroom and extracurricular activities may have transformed them.

Peter McLellan, who leads the Oxford Milestone Project, says that he sees the student projects as a measure of how well the university is doing at creating a sense of belonging. “We know reflection helps students professionally and more broadly in moments when they are in transition,” says McLellan. “It helps them build relationships. When you know who you are, when you’re faced with challenges, troubles, and opportunities, you’re more likely to overcome those situations.”

Students will do similar reflection work in the new First-Year Flourishing Seminars. In these weekly classes, students think about flourishing in a variety of areas from the power of

Where Students Are The Content

IMAGINE BEING PART OF AN EMORY COURSE WHERE “YOU ARE THE CONTENT” IN YOUR VERY FIRST SE-

MESTER. That’s the promise behind ten flourishing seminars being piloted as part of the First-Year Seminar program in Emory College. Following Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda’s introduction of student flourishing as an overarching theme a year ago, the university has sought ways to deepen Emory’s legacy of preparing students to think critically, act ethically, and work collaboratively.

Each first-year flourishing seminar offers a multidisciplinary approach and an opportunity for students to apply what they learn to their own lives. The ten courses are rooted in a wide range of traditional courses of study at Emory College:

• Fairytales and Flourishing (French)

• The Power of Storytelling (American Studies)

• The Science of Study (Psychology)

• Flourishing, or “The Good Life” (Philosophy)

• Imagine a Just City (Biology)

• Buddhism and Human Flourishing (Religion)

• Economics of Systemic Racism (Economics)

• Nonhuman Flourishing (Comparative Literature)

• Contemplate, Debate, Create (Dance)

• Happiness and Human Flourishing (Philosophy)

A SCIENTIST AND A COMEDIAN WALK INTO A CLASSROOM. They start a discussion about how art can influence social justice. You’ll have to wait for the punchlines. Emory first-year students are creating them as part of a new fall class called Human Flourishing: Imagine a Just City. “Humans cannot flourish without true justice,” says Micaela Martinez, Emory assistant professor of biology, who developed the class. “We have so many huge societal problems that need creativity, imagination, hope, and optimism to solve.”

The class is among the new FirstYear Flourishing Seminars. It is also part of the Emory Arts and Social Justice (ASJ) Fellows program, which pairs Emory faculty with Atlanta artists to explore how creative thinking and artistic expression can inspire change.

Martinez is co-teaching with ASJ Fellow David Perdue, a comedian. “You can’t save the world with jokes,” Perdue says. “But humor can be a good way to raise awareness of what’s going on. It’s a first step.”

Martinez, who joined the Emory faculty last year, is an infectious disease ecologist. Her lab studies how ecology,