ENGS 15.17 - Designing Your Life

This course applies the tools and mindsets of human-centered design to the ongoing project of designing your life and career. Designers who receive a liberal arts education are trained to navigate ambiguity, craft clarity from complexity, imagine alternatives, and create change collaboratively. These abilities are particularly well-suited to building your way forward through the complex, open-ended challenge of creating a life of meaning and purpose in a swiftly-evolving world. Through engagement in interactive exercises, readings, group discussions, guest speakers, conversations with on- and off-campus professionals, a group project, and writing assignments, students will work to articulate their values and priorities, envision diverse life trajectories, conduct small experiments to explore those trajectories, synthesize research about current and future career trends, reflect on the utility of the transferable human skills they are gaining from a liberal arts education, and build a personal toolkit of professional wayfinding practices. They will emerge with a new understanding of life as an ongoing design project—one in which decisions about academic, personal, and vocational journeys can be prototyped, tested, and iterated—and one that they will have new excitement and confidence to undertake. Priority given to seniors, juniors, and then sophomores; first-year students are not eligible.

This course is graded in the credit/no credit grade mode.