Frank J. Guarini School of Business Hosts Life Design Workshop
On August 28 and 29, the Frank J. Guarini School of Business hosted the Life Design Workshop, in collaboration with The Ideas Lab, a company specializing in design thinking, innovation, and life design training. The event was part of JCU’s Fall 2024 Orientation Week.
About the Workshop
The program, designed for incoming John Cabot University students, is aimed at helping them effectively plan their JCU experience and beyond, facilitating their integration into the community and setting the foundation for a fulfilling university experience.
The workshop is structured as follows: a one-hour session in the Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, and a final follow-up session at the end of the semester to assess progress, celebrate achievements, and make any necessary adjustments.
The philosophy behind the workshop is to help new students develop a stronger awareness that the academic journey is an important part of forging the young men and women they want to become and to encourage them to explore the multiple opportunities that John Cabot offers for personal and professional growth.
The activities
The activities were carried out under the guidance of workshop facilitators Alessia Anniballo, founder of The Ideas Lab, and JCU marketing Professor Tanja Lanza, an expert in experience design.
After sharing her experiences and perspectives, Alessia Anniballo introduced the life design approach, a way to find one’s own path by treating life and career as a problem-solving experiment. This approach includes setting long-term goals, and observing and carrying out experiments, a pattern that was exemplified through several hands-on activities. Throughout the workshop, students were asked to identify their life goals, find like-minded peers, and start to connect their aspirations with the JCU offerings that align with their personal objectives. The workshop concluded with a goal-setting exercise where students committed to specific, actionable objectives for the semester, with a view to reviewing them in the follow-up session planned for November.
Key Takeaways
The feedback provided by students showed that they realized that student life can be an experiment, with goals that can be set at the beginning and modified along the way; that failure and success are part of the process, with success being the result of a meandering, nonlinear path; and, most importantly, that they can define their own success.
