On a sunny Friday afternoon in Storrs, just two weeks into the fall semester, a few dozen mentors in the First Year Experience (FYE) program pack into a classroom in the Philip E. Austin Building for a required Life Purpose Lab workshop. They look a little harried, juggling backpacks, checking emails, and scarfing down protein bars as they wait for everyone to arrive. Bradley Wright, a sociology professor at UConn since 1998 and founder of the lab, stands at the front of the room, welcoming each participant and handing them a blank journal. Lean and light on his feet, with a neat salt-and-pepper goatee, Wright is warm but decidedly low-key.
The mentors, mostly sophomores and juniors, are wrapping up a busy week assisting instructors in FYE seminars and meeting one-on-one with their assigned first-years. They work hard to give these incoming students, all arriving with their own unique ambitions and worries, a leg up on college life so that they can adapt and thrive.
This September afternoon, however, will be all about their own futures: What are they going to do with their lives? Are they on autopilot, or have they really considered all the possibilities that lie ahead? The workshop is no small commitment. It’s made up of two intensive sessions, a week apart, each four hours long. Judging by the surrounding chatter, the students are feeling curious and a bit anxious. A few are dreading it. (Eight hours!)
Some 350 students apply for the 170 mentor spots in Storrs each year. Those selected are trained in peer mentoring through a credit-bearing educational psychology course. “We employ a theory-to-practice model where mentors are learning theory and skill sets in the educational psychology classroom and then applying them in their first-year seminars with their mentees,” says Jordan Ochs ’17 MA, Cert., ’20 Ph.D.,the FYE program director and a member of Life Purpose Lab’s leadership team (along with Emily Pagano and Eran Peterson).
Ochs partnered with Wright to tailor this particular workshop for mentors. “We want them to explore their own purpose,” says Ochs. “In addition, we want them to focus on how to make the student leadership experience the most purposeful it can be, giving them some of the perspective and tools to engage their mentees in conversations around their own purpose journeys.”
Wright gets the mentors’ attention from the get-go. “The goal of this workshop,” he tells them in his introduction, “is to move from your projected life to your purposeful life. How would you use the time, so you have no regrets?” After warm-up activities, he assigns a writing exercise that requires them to envision their lives if they stay on their current trajectory, letting inertia be their guide. That is their baseline, Wright tells them. Now, what would happen if instead they applied purpose to all the decisions ahead?
