Designing life: How college courses in coping are booming
On a recent weekday in a classroom at Smith College, a dozen or so undergraduates hunch over circular tables, scribbling intently. Their teacher strolls around the room, past sticker-covered laptops and water bottles, looking down at the laser-focused students.
“I want you to get really, really detailed,” she says.
They write.
“OK,” she says a few moments later, and the students sigh. Not enough time. “Now I want you to check in with your partner.”
There is some awkward shifting of chairs. And then, quietly, they begin to read off their worksheets.
“I just – I don’t know how to fit in all my goals in my weekly schedule.”
“Where do I want to live? What do I want to do?”
“I feel pulled in multiple directions at once.”
“Family is really important to me. Wherever I end up, I want to be near them. But that’s limiting, you know?”
Stacie Hagenbaugh, director of Smith’s Lazarus Center for Career Development, moves quietly around the room. This is the fifth time she has taught the Getting Unstuck When You Don’t Know What’s Next workshop, a new course that has been gaining attention across campus. So she is not surprised by what she’s hearing.
“Students often get really overwhelmed by all the possibilities,” she says. “There’s so much – the clutter in their heads gets in the way.”
The goal of Getting Unstuck is to help students focus, and to fill what many are increasingly pointing out as a gaping hole in modern college education – a lack of attention to those big life questions about what matters, how to be happy, and what to do next. It is one of a number of similar initiatives that Ms. Hagenbaugh has helped launch
Behind Gen Z student stress“Wicked problems”Tasks toward self-knowledgeNot knowing is OKLong ago, a focus on living wellTime and space to think
