How Bowling Green State University’s Life Design Program Helps Students

Developing a roadmap for life at 18 years old that allows for little deviation seems like an unrealistic and daunting task for the average teenager with minimal life experience. Yet every year, more than 2.3 million high school graduates leave their homes and venture to college campuses across the country to begin a career path predetermined by little more than what they think they are good at or what they think they like. 

In a bold move meant to help underclassmen, Bowling Green State University has turned to Life Design — an initiative aimed at not only helping to chart a path toward creating a fulfilling career, but also finding a life direction that brings joy, stimulation and the ability to pivot when circumstances insist on it. The challenge: Pick three career choices and map out your destiny with a realistic choice, a secondary option and a “wild-card dream job” if money were no object. But that’s just the beginning.

In a November 2022 Mary Christie Institute study of 1,005 adults between the ages of 22 and 28 who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly 40% responded that “college did not help them develop skills to prepare them for the emotional or behavioral impact of the transition to the workplace.” BGSU is seizing the opportunity to confront this challenge with Life Design.

Created by Stanford University professors William Burnett and David Evans, the program has been introduced on more than 400 college campuses across the United States, but no other institution has embraced it as wholeheartedly as BGSU. Life Design goes beyond the career-center setting and typical academic advisor that traditionally guides conversations with upperclassmen about how to proceed after graduation.

With this program, life coaches have been injecting themselves into the process during orientation or the first semester at BGSU since 2020. Together, coach and student project a path that is not just logical and financially driven but puts the power in the hands of the student to identify what goals are most important to achieve in his or her life and implement a plan to accomplish them. It begins with an Odyssey journey and ends with prototypes that test each path. In between, students are encouraged to, as the program’s co-founder Burnett likes to say, “get out into the world and try stuff.”


The Inspiration 

It all began with a problem. Undergraduate students in Adjunct Professor William Burnett’s design theory classes at Stanford University began lamenting over how to launch their careers after graduating. So, Burnett teamed up with Dave Evans, a lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, to create a class called Designing Your Life. 

“It seemed like figuring out your future was just a design problem because the future is uncertain, and designers make stuff all the time that is brand new to the world. It’s never been done before — just like your life in the future,” Burnett explains. “So, we applied all the same human-centered design thinking principles to life, and it turned out to be a really good fit. The students really loved it.”

The class was so well received that it prompted a book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. And when the calls began coming from other universities that wanted to offer the class shortly after the book launched in 2016, the duo created a “transfer studio” to teach the curriculum. The five-day training session offers an introductory session on design theory and provides all the concepts that students need to create their own successful life toolkit. 

“It’s like a giant Lego kit,” Burnett marvels. “You can build anything with it.” 

That book caught the eye of BGSU President Rodney Rogers while he was walking through Los Angeles International Airport. At the time, Rogers was already grappling with an issue of his own: how to be more intentional in helping students optimize their time in college.  

“[This] was a framework that we could use so students have a roadmap on how to go to college, maximize their experience and prepare them for career success, as well as find meaning in life,” Rogers explains.

Convinced he had found the antidote to a lackluster college experience, Rogers invited Burnett and his team to BGSU in early 2020 to train more than 70 faculty and staff members on the fundamentals of Life Design, such as collaborating, taking action, being curious and embracing the process. 

“President Rogers called us up and said, ‘Hey, I want to run this at our school. I think it’d be really impactful for our demographic of students.’ And I said, ‘You should come to a studio.’ And he said, ‘No, I really want to go big on this. I want you to come and train us,’” Burnett recalls. 

The Program

Like other universities, BGSU created a one-credit introduction to the Life Design methodology titled BGSU 1910: Life Design at BGSU. 

“The idea was that they would get introduced to the concepts of Life Design and … to the resources and opportunities on campus,” says Adrienne Ausdenmoore, executive vice president and executive director of the Radbill Center for College and Life Design at BGSU. “And then they would have a Life Design coach that they could continue to connect with throughout their BGSU experience.” 

When the program launched in the fall of 2020, six Life Design coaches were on hand to teach and coach the 600 freshmen enrolled in the inaugural course.

One of the first things students are asked to do is to design three different Odyssey plans — each with an anticipated trajectory on how life would look five to 10 years down the road if the student selected each path. Trial runs called “prototypes” allow opportunities to “try on” jobs and decide whether to pursue and invest more time in them. These trials also call for conversations with those already involved in a particular profession and encourage internships, shadowing and volunteering to become immersed in the field. Along the way, students are asked to create a dashboard to track progress, set goals and reflect on whether each path is as fulfilling as the student anticipated.   

As the program gained momentum at BGSU, two donors took notice and stepped forward to give the initiative not one but two physical homes on campus: the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design and the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Hub for Career Design and Connections. 

“With the two gifts in 2022, the idea was ‘How do we make this an ecosystem on campus, so it’s not just one office?’” Ausdenmoore explains.  

As the Radbill Center settled into its new home on the third floor of McLeod Hall, the Bowen-Thompson Student Union took on a new life as the Kuhlin Hub. While the Radbill Center provides a collaborative space for students to work with Life Design coaches, the Kuhlin Hub focuses on providing the skills and resources students need to make connections in their desired fields. 

“We want to be known for Life Design, but I think, more broadly, BGSU might be known as being a university that’s leading the path on justifying higher education,” notes Steve Russell, assistant vice president and executive director of the Kuhlin Hub. 

With 75% of first-year students formally introduced to the Life Design experience, Ausdenmoore says the goal is 100% involvement of incoming first-year students in the 2024-25 school year.

“Our ultimate goal is that BGSU is graduating students that are innovative problem solvers with a sense of purpose and intentionality that are highly desired in any industry,” she says. 


The Experience 

Before Devin Darr ever set foot on campus, he had an ally helping him achieve success. The first-generation college student’s Life Design coach reached out to him before the start of his first semester.

“My Life Design coach just wanted to get to know me and answer any questions I had. She wanted to learn my story, where I was coming from, what my thoughts and fears were,” says the fourth-year student with a major in physics and a minor in astronomy. “And she helped me get connected with other resources, which vastly improved my understanding of what my first semester would be like in college.”

Meanwhile, Ella Dedes arrived as an “undecided” major and did not take the introductory Life Design seminar. Instead, she was introduced to the program via a roommate who already seemingly had her life all mapped out. As it turned out, her roommate had a Life Design coach. 

“I reached out to her life coach, and I told her, ‘Just tell me what to do, and I’ll rock it,’” recalls the senior. “So, she worked with me one-on-one and made it very targeted for my life and what I wanted to get out of it. She was able to help me realize that I can do hard things.”

In addition to majoring in communication sciences and disorders to pursue a career in speech therapy, Dedes is president of her sorority and the National Student Speech Language and Hearing Association as well as a member of the American Sign Language Club and the Order of Omega — Greek life’s equivalent to the National Honor Society. 

Today, Darr and Dedes serve as senior Life Design student ambassadors who work alongside the students in the program by helping plan activities and building community among peers. 

“We help lead the discussions of the curriculum and really help to connect the dots between all of the steps of the [Life Design] thinking process,” Darr explains. 

Dedes says no matter what path students take, the decision to include Life Design in that process is a crucial step. 

“I definitely would say that Life Design was the reason that I had the push to get involved because I didn’t know where to start,” she admits. “The first step is always the scariest, and Life Design helped me take that first step.”

For more information about Life Design at BGSU, visit bgsu.edu/life-design.

This story ran in the Winter-Spring 2025 issue of College 101.