6 Tips for designing a valuable, meaningful and memorable academic year.
As the new academic year begins, and we begin to return to campus life after 18 months, the beginning of semester one will bring about several changes for many and the start of new beginnings for others.
Inspired by Dave Evans’s book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, in this blogpost, the team at Mi:Lab demonstrate that a design mindset is not just for innovating universities and institutions but a guiding compass for all of us to combine empathy, humility, creativity, experimentation, and a bias towards action to design meaningful change in all aspects of our lives.
We have derived 6 tips for students that can help you to design your higher education journey, creating a valuable, meaningful and memorable experience this semester:
1). Find your Why
Most people know their what and their how, but a lot less know their why i.e., the reason they get up in the morning. Author, Simon Sinek suggests that individuals that know their why are those best equipped to succeed. This is because they are acting from the inside out and towards goals they honestly believe in. Consider your ‘why’ this academic year to provide focus, context, and guidance. You don’t have to have your ultimate ‘why’ figured out but try to find an anchor at this moment in your life — maybe it’s a person, a small goal or a bigger dream.
2). Connect with your creativity
As the new academic year begins, it is important to connect with your creativity and recognise the strength and potential in your creative abilities. IDEO’s Tom and David Kelley authored the book ‘Creative Confidence’ where they discuss the importance of harnessing our creativity. Creativity in fact, comes into play wherever you can generate new ideas, solutions, or approaches. The Kelley brothers liken our creative confidence to a muscle in our bodies. The more you train, exercise, and utilise this muscle, the stronger it becomes. Throughout the academic year, leverage your creative abilities to solve problems creatively and explore new ideas.
3). Explore Curiosity
“Curiosity is the fuel for discovery, inquiry and learning” — anonymous
Curiosity is the heart of creativity. When we are open minded to new ideas and patterns, we have the potential to uncover new opportunities. We encourage you to remain curious this year and continue to probe and ask questions. By challenging your own biases and point of view, you will gain several opportunities for learning.
4). Embrace Ambiguity
As human beings, we seek out comfort, certainty and safety. At Mi:Lab, we encourage you to believe it’s okay not to know and to get comfortable in the ambiguity. It can often be difficult to slow down and become comfortable not knowing what the answers are. During any creative process, we often face moments of doubt and uncertainty, where a known path is unclear. This ambiguity enables us to explore unfamiliar spaces and induces creativity by going beyond our innate methods and practices. Although our Higher Education journey may be filled with challenging times of uncertainty and ambiguity, we encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and try to embrace the sense of ambiguity.
5). Practice Empathy
“In the end, design is all about empathy. This is what leads to creativity, inspiration, and breakthrough solutions to problems” Leon Segal
Empathy is a core principle of design. We can often be guilty of falling for ‘the empathy delusion’ where we think we understand one another but we’re just projecting our own way of thinking. Empathy enables us to focus on people’s needs and goals by talking to people and looking to serve and meet not only their functional needs but also their social and emotional needs.
6). Embrace failure
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
By pledging to pilot new ideas or try something new, we expose ourselves to an opportunity to learn. A fear of failure often impedes us from trying something new. However, if failure presents itself, it can often be more valuable for us in the long run. By acknowledging what we have done wrong, we can often pivot based on the outcomes of these learnings, to create more meaningful value. At Mi:Lab, we consider intellectual humility as a force for change and by challenging our biases and questioning norms, we can often explore opportunities and ideas.
Download our Design your life: Academic Year Template here to consciously note the actions you wish to take this year and consider the motivations and challenges you might face when trying out these points of action.
