Where this work has been written up.

Most institutional career platforms are built for the institution, not the student. They prioritize placement metrics and operational efficiency while underbuilding the slower reflective work the students themselves need to do. Students end up moving between disconnected tools (resume builders, skill inventories, advising systems, networking platforms) each of which shows a different version of them, with no way to connect the pieces over time. This paper proposes a four-part framework for redesigning career development systems as longitudinal learning environments: reflection (structured writing and exercises through which the student articulates what they know about themselves); interpretation (tools that surface patterns in the reflective material without prescribing what the patterns mean); visualization (maps and diagrams that externalize thinking so the student can see their own configurations); and action (job search, mentorship, and skill-building deployed after self-knowledge rather than before it). The framework is grounded in higher-education research on high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005), constructionist accounts of vocational behavior (Savickas, 2013; McAdams, 1993), and the design-based research tradition (Brown, 1992; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). It informs the design of five working prototypes that Lo/Be Lab maintains across academic terms, each documented in a companion working report. The paper argues that the dominant institutional pattern (career development as service delivery) should be replaced by a pattern that treats career development as scaffolded learning across the academic term.

Career counseling at most universities operates on a high-touch, low-frequency model: one student, one advisor, one thirty-minute session. As a delivery model it is humane. As a developmental support, it is structurally mismatched to the work it is asked to do, because career formation in undergraduates is a longitudinal identity process (Baxter Magolda, 2001; Marcia, 1966) rather than a one-time decision amenable to advice. This paper describes DartWorld, a spatial narrative platform built at Dartmouth College in collaboration with the DALI Lab to test whether a sustained, environment-shaped reflection practice can scale to a full undergraduate cohort. The platform integrates three components: a reflective onboarding instrument that sorts students into one of three identity archetypes (Explorer, Seeker, Achiever); a navigable three-dimensional environment for treating career exploration as a place to walk through rather than a list to scroll; and a journaling pinboard that persists across sessions and supports longitudinal review. Development followed a design-based research methodology (Brown, 1992; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003) with rolling ten-week iterations alongside successive student development teams. We argue, drawing on Schön's reflective-practitioner tradition (Schön, 1983), Kolb's experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984), and Dede's immersive-environments research (Dede, 2009), that DartWorld is most properly understood not as a digital career service but as a sustained reflective environment.

The standard output of computer-driven career assessment is a ranked list of occupations sorted by match score. This paper argues that the ranked-list format imports two well-documented interface failures into the assessment context: position bias, which structurally undervalues options past the first three results (Joachims et al., 2005; Pan et al., 2007), and choice overload, which produces decision paralysis when the option set becomes too large (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000; Chernev et al., 2015). Together these failures foreclose the very exploratory work that career assessment is meant to enable. We describe Synapse, a working prototype that replaces the ranked-list output with a spatial map of 460 occupations drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the O*NET system. Students answer thirteen forced-choice questions; results are presented as a position within a continuous occupational landscape, with semantically similar careers placed in spatial proximity. We position the work within design-based research (Brown, 1992; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003) and contemporary constructionist accounts of vocational behavior (Savickas, 2002, 2013). The contribution is a design rationale and a deployable artifact, not a controlled effectiveness evaluation; we close with a research agenda for the empirical work the design move requires. The paper is part of an ongoing research program at Lo/Be Lab on environments that support reflective work during life transitions.

Most university career programs are organized around discrete services (advising sessions, resume reviews, job-board access). They rarely scaffold the slower, longitudinal work of identity development that precedes informed career choice. This paper documents the Career Design Lab (CDL), a semester-long program at Dartmouth College that integrates six tools (Identity Mapping Studio, Tile Sorting, Pattern Distillation, OneWord, Launch Studio, and a recursive Sequence framework) into a single deliberation arc taken by cohorts of 15 to 30 students. Each tool was developed and tested independently before being integrated into the program; each academic term constitutes both a delivered curriculum and a research cycle that informs the next iteration. We argue, drawing on deliberation theory (Fishkin, 2009; Yankelovich, 1991), on the developmental-psychology literature on self-authorship (Baxter Magolda, 2001), on Vygotsky's account of the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), and on Shulman's framework of signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005), that the program's defining design move is to treat career formation as a signature pedagogy of undergraduate education rather than as a service.

Career advising at the institutional level is dominated by the resume and the interview script. Both formats presume that students already know what they want to say about themselves and need help saying it more effectively. Many students do not lack experience; they lack a structured method for finding the meaningful pattern inside what they have already done. This paper documents Narrative by Design (NBD), a 90-minute facilitated workshop developed at Dartmouth College that supports narrative discovery through three operations: a compression sequence that takes the student from a free-form paragraph to a single defended word; three card-sort instruments adapted from established assessments (Knowdell Career Values, CliftonStrengths, Motivated Skills) that triangulate the student's values, strengths, and skills; and an AI-assisted mirror layer that surfaces gaps between the student's self-description and the evidence the card sorts produce. We draw on McAdams's narrative identity theory (McAdams, 1993, 2001), Pennebaker's research on expressive writing (Pennebaker, 1997), Mezirow's transformative learning framework (Mezirow, 1997), and recent work on generative AI in education (Mollick & Mollick, 2023). We argue that the 90-minute time constraint is itself a pedagogical design move and that the AI layer functions as mirror, not advisor.

Generic career resources rarely speak to the field-specific economic and cultural realities of architecture, where licensure pathways, portfolio culture, firm hierarchies, and the studio-crit pedagogy shape decisions that other career tools cannot anticipate. This paper documents Threshold, a discipline-specific career toolkit for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design students and emerging professionals. The platform combines a verified searchable database of architecture firms across the United States with reflection exercises adapted to the studio critique format that students already practice in their formal training. We draw on Lee Shulman's framework of signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005), Donald Schön's analyses of the architectural studio (Schön, 1985, 1987), the empirical and critical literature on the design crit as ritual (Anthony, 1991; Webster, 2007), and Career Construction Theory's account of career adaptability (Savickas, 2013; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). We argue that reflection methods generalize across professions but reflection content does not, and that respecting the existing signature pedagogy of a discipline is a prerequisite for any tool seeking adoption within it.

This paper documents the design rationale of a two-hour mentor-training workshop delivered to international undergraduate peer mentors at Dartmouth College in May 2026, in which inclusive leadership is reframed as narrative co-authorship: the practice of staying anchored in one's own narrative so that one can hold space for someone else to find theirs. We position this framing as a relational stance rather than the competency cluster that dominates the inclusive leadership literature (Bourke & Espedido, 2019; Hewlett, Marshall, & Sherbin, 2013), and translate the stance into a workshop architecture that adapts Stanford Life Design (Burnett & Evans, 2016) for a non-native-English-speaking undergraduate mentor population. The workshop's pedagogical signature is a designed sequence combining narrative compression, the Knowdell Career Values Card Sort, and a compressed Odyssey Plan, intended to produce a values-tested anchor word each mentor can carry into the fall match-introductions. Pre-workshop survey data (n=13 of approximately 20) revealed a gap that directly shaped the design: 77% of mentors self-identified as question-askers when a mentee shares anxiety, yet 38% named mentee disengagement as their biggest fear. We document a set of ESL-conscious design practices developed across an extended iteration cycle, name what was cut for time and why, and offer the workshop architecture as a replicable design vocabulary for practitioners building leadership development for similar audiences. Post-workshop evaluation is in preparation; this paper is a design rationale, not an outcomes report.