Designing Women

With the landscape of American federal policy and funding shifting, change—the topic of Bryn Mawr’s first in-person International Forum, held in March in London—seemed an appropriate focus for alumnae/i whose careers across various industries are emerging, transitioning, or concluding. 

Bryn Mawr's Career and Civic Engagement Center facilitated an interactive workshop for Forum attendees on the principles of design thinking—a concept developed by faculty at Stanford University to incorporate creative thinking and prototyping into career and life planning. Since receiving a generous $1 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts in February 2024, the Center has strategically infused design thinking into various facets of career counseling, leadership development, and credit-bearing coursework. 

Jennifer Beale, the Center's assistant director of career counseling and pre-law advisor, was among the first Bryn Mawr staff to be trained in design thinking and eagerly promotes its use among students, staff, and alumnae/i. 

“I find that this type of thinking really helps people to get ‘unstuck’ and have agency in moving forward through life and career decisions,” Beale says. “I love that it embraces action, even if messy, because many of us self-limit with perfectionism.” 

Equipped in the training and facilitation of design thinking, Beale, along with two other Center staff and two undergraduate students, traveled to London to introduce the mindsets and processes implicit in design thinking. They led a ballroom full of Mawrters through a “mind mapping” or visual idea-generating exercise to elicit attendees’ unconscious associations, including interests, skills, favorite places, hobbies, etc. to generate a fanciful story. 

“I find that this type of thinking really helps people to get ‘unstuck’ and have agency in moving forward through life and career decisions.”

This exercise—akin to free associative writing—was an appropriate preamble for the main activity: the Odyssey exercise. Attendees were tasked with creating three life designs: the first was a one- to-five-year projection of their current lives; the second was the alternate life they could pursue if the career or personal choices germane to their first were unavailable; and the third was the grand, imaginative life they'd lead if resources were not a constraint. 

“My group found community through shared constraints,” says Francesca Marrapodi ’25. “What struck me most about this experience was seeing participants advocate for each other's joy and the orientation shift towards possibility.” 

It is the conceptual thinking, communication, reflective practice, and connections central to the Bryn Mawr education that prepare graduates to courageously design careers and lives in coherence with their values and convictions. The Forum proved that regardless of the topic of discussion, when you gather 100 Mawrters in a ballroom, you can expect camaraderie and collaboration, and that wisdom will light the way.