Taylor Your Life Fall 2018 Report
Taylor Your Life is a changemaking career development lab that teaches undergraduate students how to approach their future with the mindset and toolkit of a designer.
Taylor Your Life (TYL) is a 2 credit 14-week social impact career development lab for undergraduate and graduate students to “Taylor” their life course by applying methods and mindsets of design thinking (human centered design) to career development. In the TYL journey, students identify multiple life paths, clarify their interests, focus and target their search, prototype and test changemaking careers, learn how to market and brand themselves to stand out from the crowd, map their community to effectively join the network of movers and shakers in their field, and design a life that makes a positive difference in the world and is “TAYLORed” to their unique life and personality.
About the Fall 2018 Report
In a questionnaire asking TYL students about their experiences, students in the Fall 2018 cohort reported that the main areas of learning included learning to envision and explore multiple life paths, learning and practicing various career development and professional skills, and learning to move past fear and failure.
Students had the following to say about TYL:
“I feel more confident going into the job search knowing that I have the opportunity to do many things in my life and that this is just the beginning.”
“I learned that there are many directions that my life can go. I may not know exactly what I want, but this course helped me to narrow down my ideas. Other people are in the same position as me, so it makes me feel less worried and that I am not alone.Thiscourse showed me new ways to look at things and I am glad I took it.”
“My greatest takeaways from this course have been understanding that many people at my age do not have a career outlined, and that there are steps to be taken to to successfully find acareer path.Another main takeaway is the fact that first job is not as important as we may think, it can end up changing afterward.”
“I solidified a lot of my interestsand was able to really reflect on different paths my life could take.”
“Greatest takeaway is reframing my thoughts from “I don’t know what I’m doing post-graduation” and feeling anxious about that to “I don’t know exactly where I am going, but I know I am going in the right direction.”I feel confident and assured in myself.”
Key takeaways from student feedback post TYL for Fall 2018 include a call to consider:
- Creating a separate section geared towards freshman/undeclared students,
- Incorporating more focus on applied skills such as interviewing skills for a larger portion of the class
- More preparation and encouragement of students to be vulnerable and emphasizing a safe space in the classroom.
Click the button below to view the full report (pdf)
About Life Design at the Taylor Center
Created by Julia Lang, Taylor life design courses teach students to “TAYLOR” their life through the application of methods and mindsets of design thinking (human-centered design) to career development. Taylor Center life design instructors come from varied academic backgrounds and teach students from every school at Tulane. To learn more about the Taylor Center’s approach to life design education, read Julia Lang’s Ten Frameworks of Life Design Education.
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