Reverse engineering transformative experiences

We think of formative experiences as happening organically, but they're often planned and intentional.

When you ask a scientist about their professional path and why they chose what they chose, the story often involves a certain event, experience, or relationship, which in retrospect was highly formative. We go through our lives and our educational careers following one experience after another, course after course, lab after lab, institution after institution, and then once in a while — WHAMMO — something strikes us in just the right way, that set us off on this path.

Yes, for those of us who make a living doing science, it’s a paying job. But it is also often a passion and a calling of sorts. While regarding science as a vocation rather than a normal job can be wielded as a cudgel of exploitation, it’s this understanding is also valuable for recruitment, retention, and supporting our students, trainees, and peers.

It might be a field trip, an independent project, or a relationship with a certain professor or student, or a moment of extraordinary natural history. Maybe something wholly prosaic but special at the moment, an instance of clarity. These moments aren’t just important for creating future scientists, these moments are golden in education in general. The things that stick with you.

These moments of magic aren’t mere happenstance, they are often crafted by those who have been charged with our professional development. Are we designing our courses, research experiences, and university environment to feature the opportunites for these transformative moments to occur?

What were those transformative experiences for me, you might ask? I think when I was in college, the opportunity to go camping on long weekend field trips into wild areas was a big deal. As a outdoorsy boy-scouty kid, I spent plenty of time hiking and backpacking away from urbanity, but going to these same places to do science was a whole other experience. Also, the professor who I did most of this stuff with clearly believed in me like I don’t think anybody else had before, and that relationship was (and still is) valuable to me. I wasn’t seen as particularly special I don’t think, but I finally had a professor who believed that everybody was special in their own way. That was huge. Another transformative experience for sure was going on the Tropical Biology fundamentals course in Costa Rica with OTS. That time provided a trajectory for the next 20 years of my career. More recently, in the last few years, the opportunity to participate in the Earth Leadership (aka Leopold) Program provided some moments and people that have been critical as I’ve hit an inflection point in my career.

I realize that some folks try to carefully craft and design these transformative moments. (There are some religious organizations that do this with their youth, for example.) I suppose you can try to highly script all this, but that to me feels rather manipulative, even if a person involved is a consenting adult. But I think on the other hand, I think it’s not only perfectly fine but also highly valuble to make a point of facilitatting opportunities, moments, and settings that help our students make meaning of their lives and the science and the people around them. Telling someone what their purpose should be is creepy, but creating opportunities for people to discover their purpose is awesome. And developing a wide range of such opportunities for people who have different kinds of purposes can discover them independently? That’s perhaps the best part of this job

Its’s useful to loosely reverse engineer the stuff that creates magical moments. I think we all do this to some extent, though often implicitly and not with a particular intentionality. If we have the chance, wouldn’t we want to take our students to locations that have compelling beauty and natural history? Wouldn’t we want to run experiments in our course laboratories that showcase the amazingness of science? Wouldn’t we want to connect people with one another and provide them opportunity for them to support one another’s growth?

(And if you look at the canoncial list of “high impact practices” in higher education, you can see that these HIPs tend to provide such moments. Which is why I think some universities, including my employer, are leaning heavily into them.)

What this looks like for each of us will vary based on what we’re teaching, who are students are, where we work, the resources available, and such. There isn’t a formula, per se. But some high quality ingredients involve time in nature, cohorted experiences, intentionality of mutual respect, providing people a chance to be vulnerable with one another, providing space for communication and introspection, new experiences, and doing cool stuff. And the opportunity for to electively experience a good kind of discomfort.

What can this look like with the people you work with? How can we fold this as a priority along with everything else?