Where this work has been written up.

Most career platforms are built for the institution, not the student. They prioritize placement metrics and operational efficiency while ignoring the reflective work students actually need to do. Students end up bouncing between disconnected tools — resume builders, skill inventories, advising systems, networking platforms — each showing a different version of them, with no way to connect the pieces over time. This paper proposes a four-part framework for designing career development systems as longitudinal learning environments: reflection (structured writing and exercises), interpretation (tools that surface patterns without prescribing meaning), visualization (maps and diagrams that externalize thinking), and action (job search, mentorship, and skill-building sequenced after self-knowledge rather than before it). We argue that the institutional design pattern of treating career development as service delivery should be replaced by a pattern that treats it as scaffolded learning across the academic term.

Career counseling at most universities is a high-touch, low-frequency practice: one student, one advisor, one thirty-minute session. As a model, it does not scale to the developmental work of figuring out who you are over weeks or months. This paper documents DartWorld, a spatial narrative platform developed at Dartmouth College in collaboration with the DALI Lab to test whether digital environments can support sustained reflective work across an academic term. The platform combines three components: a reflective onboarding instrument that sorts students into one of three identity archetypes, a navigable 3D environment for exploring careers as a place rather than a list, and a journaling pinboard where entries persist across sessions and can be revisited. Development followed a design-based research model with rolling ten-week iterations alongside successive student development teams. We discuss design implications for institutional career platforms that frame student development as longitudinal learning rather than transactional service.

Computer-driven career assessments typically return ranked lists of occupational matches sorted by fit score. Empirically, students attend almost exclusively to the top several entries and ignore the long tail, foreclosing the very exploration the assessment is meant to enable. This paper documents Synapse, a career exploration instrument that replaces the ranked-list output with a spatial map of 460 occupations drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET. Students answer thirteen forced-choice questions and receive their results as a position within a continuous occupational landscape, with similar careers placed in spatial proximity. The instrument was developed iteratively, with the central design pivot being the move from list-based to map-based output and the consequent change in user behavior. We argue that interface form is part of the cognitive task itself: ranked outputs ask students to choose, while spatial outputs ask them to wander, and only the latter supports productive career exploration.

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, 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. 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. The program treats career decision-making as a design problem amenable to iteration rather than a counseling problem amenable only to expertise. We discuss the implications of treating institutional career services as living prototypes that students inhabit rather than fixed services they receive.

Career advising at the institutional level is dominated by the resume and the interview script. Both 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, a 90-minute facilitated workshop developed at Dartmouth College that compresses students' own descriptions of themselves through three stages — a free-form paragraph, then a single sentence, then one motivational word — paired with three card-sort instruments adapted from existing measures (Knowdell Career Values, CliftonStrengths, and Motivated Skills). A companion web tool layers an AI suggestion that surfaces the gap between students' self-described and resume-evident patterns, treating the model as a mirror rather than a judge. We argue that compression-by-deletion is a more productive method for narrative discovery than synthesis-from-blank-page, because the operation of cutting forces commitments that the operation of building does not.

Generic career resources rarely speak to the field-specific economic and cultural realities of architecture, where licensure pathways, portfolio culture, and firm hierarchies shape decisions that other professional 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 students already practice in their formal training. The case study examines what generalizes across discipline-specific career platforms and what must be re-built for each profession. We argue that reflection methods generalize but vocabulary does not, and that respecting the existing pedagogical culture of a profession is a prerequisite for adoption.