In 2023, St. Olaf College was awarded a grant from the Network of Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) under its Vocation Across the Curriculum initiative.

At St. Olaf the project, entitled Life On Purpose, is being managed by the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community.

This four-year grant is dedicated to helping faculty and staff infuse vocational reflection and discernment in the holistic advising, mentoring, and learning integration experiences we have been developing for our students with the For Every Ole initiative. Grant dollars are designated for developing and field testing a variety of approaches to fostering vocational reflection in diverse contexts, such as First-Year Experience course assignments, co-curricular colloquia, and team-based advising, including alumni mentoring pods. Participating faculty and staff are encouraged to develop Communities of Practice that share resources for vocational reflection, and to create hands-on professional development experiences that foster their own vocational discernment. Our goal in this project is to enhance not only our students’ capacity for vocational reflection, but also their sense of belonging and their persistence.

1. Advancing the implementation of the holistic, developmental, individualized pathway program that the For Every Ole initiative has been charged with designing.
2. Developing and sharing more resources for vocational reflection and discernment for use across a variety of curricular and co-curricular experiences.
3. Enhancing the capacity of participating faculty and staff to provide (1) holistic, developmental, collaborative advising and mentoring, and (2) opportunities for vocational reflection and discernment.
4. Enhancing participating students’ capacity for vocational reflection. Piloting opportunities that will help students gain knowledge and skills that support vocational reflection; in course-based program pilots, the goal is that a majority of participating students will demonstrate meaningful vocational reflection in written work.
5. Increasing students’ sense of belonging. Provide vocational opportunities and/or resources that increase student experiences of feeling valued by and connected to St. Olaf.
6. Increasing student retention. Provide vocational opportunities and/or resources that can be linked to wider efforts throughout the college to increase retention.

During the first year of the project in 2023-2024, the grant supported several communities of practice and pilot projects across college that infused vocational exploration into their work and created resources for use across the college. Learn more about these projects below:

SOAR and Wellness Center Leader Training Dinner

The Academic Success Center, the Wellness Center, and the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community

Providing the leaders tools and strategies for vocational exploration and reflection for themselves as student leaders and with students as they engage in their work.

Reflecting on Purpose, Pathways, and Equity through Reading and Writing About College Transition Narratives: A Proposed Field Testing Program Pilot

Diane LeBlanc

The pilot is integrated into Writing-Intensive First-Year Seminar 120D, Creating Self during the Fall 2023 semester. The pilot, named “Identities and the Paths We Choose” is a mid-course, three-week sequence that situates purpose and equity at the core of OLE Question 1, “In what ways can I understand the world and my role in it?” (i.e. vocation)

Life on Purpose in Music 237

Rehanna Kheshgi

This pilot incorporates vocation into the Music 237 course on Local and Global Musicking, by using it as a guiding framework. As the students develop their community engagement project proposals they will complete life purpose statements and reflect upon vocational statements by ethnomusicologists.

Solidarity and the Common Good

Alyssa Melby

Create an Ethical Engagement Module that will explicitly make the link between St. Olaf’s current definition of vocation, Life on Purpose. For the Common Good, and ethical engagement with others, locally and globally. 

Center Directors’ Visioning

Deanna Thompson, Kirsten Cahoon, Martin Olague, Jodi Malmgren, and Chris Chapp

The Center directors will develop a vision and map for ways in which a more coherent and coordinated approach by the Centers could provide meaningful, specific touch points for students along their four-year pathway and how to implement a more coordinated approach of student engagement with the Centers.

Literacies Framework Development

Library and IT Services

Develop necessary literacies for lifelong learning and provide students with flexible, transferable skills to support their future abilities to engage with the world in meaningful, ethical, and effective ways. 

Kierkegaard and Vocation

Kierkegaard Library

The Kierkegaard Library will offer a three-part lecture series offering a Kierkegaardian philosophical and theological structure upon which to lean during vocational discernment.

TRIO Summer Bridge Writing 109: The Vocation of Being a Student

Bridget Draxler

A short series of vocation-themed events to support both the 6 Writing TAs (“envisioning” and “activation”) and 40 students (“exploration”) for the TRIO program.

Peer Educator Vocational Retreat 

Wellness Center

The Wellness Center hosted a retreat for their Peer Educators to reflect on their work vocationally so that the Center can more fully infuse vocational exploration into the experience of Peer Educators.

Vocation and the Individual Major Programming

Anne Berry

To reflect on how vocation can be built into the “curriculum” for those students pursuing an individual major.

Vocational Exploration in SOAR 

Tara Hupton and Peter Schattauer

SOAR Leaders and Interfaith Fellows will work to develop vocational exploration exercises to be used within SOAR lessons for the 2024-2025 school year. The exercises will help to empower SOAR leaders to explore vocation with first years, and will help first years think broadly about living life on purpose as college students.