Notre Dame 2030: A Force Reinvigorated
"What should the University of Notre Dame be like in 12 years?"
While we like to think that our University is perfect, our team was challenged to dive deeper into who we are as a college and if that is what we should be and what we should strive to be in the future. Randy Balletta, Rebecca Huber, Dan McGlinn, Sarah Pieslak, and I began this deep dive with identifying the major stakeholders in Notre Dame and its various arms. The stakeholder map we finished our first team meeting with was nothing short of complicated, messy and just plain confusing. We took a step back from our giant drawing and tried to make sense of it, but that proved to be a herculean task. Finally, someone said, "everything is too interconnected to focus on one major area to enact change in". I think 5 lightbulbs went off in all 5 of our heads: the university needs to take more advantage of that interconnectedness.
Following the stakeholder realization, we developed interview questions and strategies to look more closely at how different groups at the University are connected and rely on each other. Some of the major collegiate themes (both as Notre Dame and as a nation) we tied through these questions were innovation, academic integration, and "being a global force for good". This final phrase fueled a lot of great discussions with students, professors, coaches, rectors and more about how the goal of Notre Dame should be broader than simply dorms, classrooms and the Dome.
Taking major insights from these interviews, we mapped out the major topics and pain-points, developed personas to depict stakeholder interest, and brain-stormed possible initiatives and concepts to accomplish our goals of making Notre Dame's academic experience more collaborative, applicable, integrated and engaging. To these ends, we really stressed the following central tenets: a revamped First Year of Studies Seminar lecture and discussion series; a more engaging classroom environment utilizing industry-sponsored projects, flipped classrooms set-ups, and more; and a study immersion experience focused on applying previously-learned knowledge to real-world situations.
After developing these concepts further, we benchmarked websites of other colleges (especially those with similar big framework ideas towards the greater good) in order to express our ideas. We the prototyped these ideas on paper and eventually transferred them to a MarvelApp website prototype at the following link: https://marvelapp.com/4gh17c9/screen/39458095
Below is our final team deliverable and presentation for our view of Notre Dame in 2030!
