alphaspirit.it/Shutterstock
Our paths into “Designing Your Life” came from different angles.
In 2019, Kiki Zissimopoulos was working in a student and faculty support role at the University of Chicago when she learned of Stanford’s Designing Your Life course and the namesake book. She had been teaching design thinking for about 10 years and was intrigued by the idea of applying this same process to explore possibilities for our lives. Zissimopoulos wanted to find a way to bring this course to students in the Chicagoland area. Three years later, she was invited to join the teaching team for the undergraduate DYL course at Northwestern University and taught her first class in 2022.
Around the same time, Aubrey Korneta was a month into her current role supporting Northwestern PhD students in their professional and career development and elbow-deep in career advising resources. She came across the “Designing Your Life” book and immediately thought, “I wish I had read this in graduate school.” It offers an actionable framework for exploring questions like “What is a good life?”, “Why work?”, and “What makes work meaningful?”. You know, the simple stuff.
While some graduate programs engage with these questions from a theoretical perspective, it’s rare that they support students practically in answering them for their own lives. PhD students spend years deeply embedded in academia, often with limited exposure to non-academic careers. Many aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to career exploration or how to articulate their (very impressive) skills for other audiences. Korneta immediately saw parallels between “Designing Your Life” and the conversations she had with students and began to imagine ways to incorporate Life Design principles into her advising work.
During a serendipitous meeting in 2023, we briefly discussed the Designing Your Life course for undergraduates, and we both saw the potential it could have for graduate students. That conversation began a multi-year collaboration to co-create and co-facilitate Designing Your Life: PhD Edition (DYL PhD), which is now approaching its third iteration. Here, we share how Design Thinking principles can support personal and career development, highlight strategies for building institutional partnerships that help scale innovative programs, and reflect on lessons from our DYL PhD program that may guide adaptation at institutions of varying sizes and resources.
How Design Thinking Can Support Career Development
According to the Stanford Life Design Lab, design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach that helps people move forward through experimentation and reflection — perfect for the open-ended challenge of designing one’s life.
Briefly, design thinking:
- Starts with accepting and empathizing with where you are.
- Provides space for exploration, ideation, and experimentation.
- Has a bias toward action — it focuses on building one’s way forward.
- Is NOT linear. It is iterative. Feedback helps refine and implement designs or goals.
- Emphasizes process and its challenges.
- Focuses on collaboration — this is not a solo endeavor.
This definition is similar to the career development model, which starts from a place of self-assessment and exploration, and moves to a more focused job search through purposeful research and relationship building, as well as hands-on experiences. At all stages, we encourage students to engage in reflection and emphasize that this process is iterative. These parallels gave us confidence that we could create a Design Thinking program to help PhD students build a path forward aligned with their skills, interests, values, and goals.
Building Cross-Campus Collaborations
One asset we have is a collaborative approach to teaching. We bring different past experiences and expertise: one of us is an engineer by training and pedagogy expert, and the other a humanist with career development expertise. To get started, we organized meetings with colleagues in The Graduate School (TGS), Northwestern Career Advancement (NCA), and the McCormick School of Engineering to gather insight from faculty who developed the undergraduate course. We launched DYL PhD thanks to the generosity and support of Northwestern’s Designing Your Life co-founders Dr. Bruce Ankenman and Pam Daniels, NCA’s career development content, and TGS’s resources.
If you’re developing similar programs, consider who might be knowledgeable about Design Thinking at your home institution. Are there colleagues in engineering and/or career and professional development who do this work? If not, identify programs at other institutions and reach out to learn about their programs.
Knowing Your Audience and Your Bandwidth
In the summer of 2023, we used the design thinking process to develop the DYL curriculum for PhDs, determining the audience, program structure, length, and activities. We targeted post-candidacy PhD students, so that participants could consider next steps for their post-PhD lives. Based on our experience facilitating other graduate-level professional development programs, we designed a six-week lunchtime program open to all disciplines, encouraging interdisciplinary exchange and creativity. Finally, we selected DYL content that we felt would be most impactful for PhD students (e.g., Curiosity Conversations, Good Time Tracker, Odyssey Plans) and identified outside resources.
Consider the academic calendar, graduate students’ schedules, and your bandwidth. When are students most likely to be available and for how long? Are they able to commit to a full-length course or a shorter workshop series? What structure works best for you, your team, and your resources? Can you start small and expand later?
Key Takeaways from Our DYL PhD Pilot
In the winter of 2024, we co-facilitated the Designing Your Life PhD Edition pilot. The six-week series brought together 11 PhD students across 10 disciplines and included small-group discussions, short reading and writing assignments, hands-on making, and alumni conversations. Upon completion of the program, we conducted a survey using Qualtrics and hosted an in-person feedback session. Here are some lessons learned that may be useful for others developing DYL programs on their own campuses:
- Radically collaborate: Design Thinking necessitates collaboration — find your people and start ideating.
- Start small and build: Participation grew from 11 students (10 disciplines) in 2024 to 17 (16 disciplines) in 2025 — highlighting how programs evolve with time, reflection, and feedback.
- Consider your audience: Different PhD stages call for different supports. Understanding students’ needs will inform the program structure and content.
- Interdisciplinarity exposes students to different ways of thinking and approaching problems. The more disciplines, the better.
- Gather feedback and iterate: We embraced design thinking in our process to understand students’ needs and iterate on our course design. Through surveys and a feedback session, we learned participants wanted more peer collaboration, a longer program, and opportunities for continued engagement. In response, we added more interactive activities, a seventh session for prototyping next steps, and a follow-up check-in two months later.
“Designing Your Life”invites us to start where we are — not where we think we should be. That simple idea helped us build a scalable, student-centered program grounded in reflection, action, and community. By applying Design Thinking principles to PhD career development, we’ve empowered students to explore their values, test possibilities, and define success on their own terms. Like any design process, this work is iterative, but starting small — with the right partners and mindset — creates meaningful change.
