It’s 4 p.m. on a Thursday in UVM’s Kalkin Hall — hello, afternoon slump! Not for Eugene Korsunskiy, who’s wearing a peppy plaid shirt and jeans and is literally bouncing around the room, arranging tables askew to the beat of Generationals tune, from a Songza “Happy” playlist that soon gives way to “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies.
Indeed, Korsunskiy resembles a sugar-buzzed, exam-crazed student as the end of spring semester approaches. But he’s actually the instructor of “Design Your Life,” a brand-new class he imported from Stanford University that’s creating its own buzz around UVM. That’s because it’s riding the crest of a trend that’s refreshing crusty-old approaches toward “careers” and “jobs” with a veritable ocean of lifelong opportunities.
Korsunskiy’s not on something, he’s onto something that Fast Company says is the future of higher education.
The original class, called “Designing Your Life” (DYL) is the brainchild of Stanford’s Bill Burnett, a former designer of Apple laptops and Star Wars action figures, and Dave Evans, who co-invented the mouse for Apple. Essentially, it’s about creative decision-making: using a multidimensional and outside-the-box approach to solve a “wicked problem.”
And it works, says Burnett, pointing to one of two PhD research projects that demonstrated how DYL lowered dysfunctional career beliefs, increased students’ ability to be more creative and improved career self-efficacy. “We also receive emails from students one to three years after the class indicating they are still using the tools that they were taught,” he says, “and that they feel that they are more at ease with their career and life progress than their peers.”
Design thinking means that instead of simply saying “I want to be in finance” and applying to Manhattan-based financial firms, students are taught to create “An Odyssey Plan” that takes into account many other facets of their future life — including feelings.
One UVM “Life” class, for example, begins with a Power-Pointed question: “How are you feeling right now?” Students are also asked to check in with their “cohort,” a name for the groupings of four to five classmates, who wear nametags and share their highlights and lowlights of the past week. There’s a brief discussion of the Odyssey Plans before Korsunskiy launches into “poetry time,” a discussion of Pablo Neruda and a field trip to a photography show at the Davis Center.
Fast-forward to the Tuesday afternoon session of Design Your Life, where a separate assemblage of cohorts (who’ve walked in to the strains of Beyoncé singing “Crazy in Love” are sharing those learnings and unlearnings: “the idea that a career is something you have to stick with your entire life.” The photos examined today include a New York City gourmet shop that sells 348 flavors of jam, which launches into a discussion of choice overload, trusting one’s gut, option maintenance and getting good at being lucky. There’s a break for “wacky arm flailing” and a slide of a needlepointed sampler that reads, “Always keep your options option.”
For a casual observer, it can seem like a Hunter S. Thompson trip. Driving this bus, though, is the highly driven Korsunskiy, who was an art major at Williams before earning his MFA in design from Stanford, where he co-taught DYL.
Burnett and Evans have been asked by many colleges for a copy of the curriculum, but haven’t had the time to train anyone — except for Korsunskiy. UVM is the first non-Stanford implementation of DYL, says Burnett, specifically because of Korsunskiy. “Eugene has a great teaching style,” he says, “and an ability to put students at ease with this sometimes challenging material.”
He began instructing three sections here at UVM this spring and reminds each of his sections that part of their homework is to tell their friends about “Design Your Life.” Word is already out, however, with only a few spots now left for the fall course.
With the potpourri of philosophies from Annie Dillard to Zappos CEO Tony Hseih, there’s plenty of grey matter at work here. But does it leave too much grey area for students who’ll need actual greenbacks to survive once they graduate? “This class is not about helping students build a roadmap for a career,” explains Korsunskiy. “It’s more to help students fine-tune their decision-making muscles going forward, understanding that life is a continuous exercise in decision making.”
“The question, ‘What are you going to do after graduation?’” gets tossed around a lot,” says student Victoria Lee, adding that her approach toward typically awkward situations such as networking nights, career fairs and interviews has changed because of the course, which has also led to several job interviews. “Eugene just is the man — he has a unique way of helping us reframe situations, recalibrating our idea of the future as not one big task after graduation but a series of thousands of small decisions that we’ll always be making, and that’s something I’ll carry with me the rest of my life.”