DartWorld
Most career offices work the same way: a student walks in, talks for thirty minutes, and leaves with a to-do list. That works if you already know what you want. Most students don't.
At Dartmouth, students show up well-prepared academically but without much practice thinking about who they are outside a transcript. The tools they get — personality quizzes, job boards, alumni directories — assume you already know yourself. They treat identity as something fixed, not something you figure out over time. There was no place designed for the slower work of sorting through what actually matters to you.
We wanted to know: could you build a digital environment that helps students do that kind of thinking — not in a one-off session, but across an entire term?
DartWorld has three parts: a reflective onboarding quiz, a 3D world you can walk through, and a journal where you track how your thinking changes. We built each piece separately, tested it with students, and then connected them.
We built DartWorld with Dartmouth's DALI Lab, a student-led technology lab that pairs undergrads with outside partners on real products. The development team changed every term — roughly every ten weeks. Each new group of student developers picked up where the last one left off, working from a design brief shaped by the previous round of user research.
That constraint turned out to be useful. No single team could hold the whole system in their heads, so the design had to be modular. Decisions had to be written down. And each ten-week cycle became a natural experiment: ship a version, watch how students use it, collect data, figure out what's working, and redesign.
Over multiple terms, we made major changes to the onboarding flow, navigation, and data architecture. Every revision came from watching real behavior, not guessing.
A few things kept showing up across deployments:
DartWorld is still running at Dartmouth's Center for Career Design. It's been through multiple major development cycles with the DALI Lab and hundreds of undergrads have used it. We're currently studying whether the archetype students choose during onboarding shapes the kind of reflection they do over the rest of the term.
The project also produced two standalone tools — the reflective onboarding quiz and the journaling pinboard — that we now use independently in other programs.