It’s also more complicated than it seems.
In an increasingly digital world, how do you meet students where they’re at? How do you ensure they know how to access much-needed resources? How do you smooth over the often-rocky transition between high school and college, or college and career?
Those are the kinds of questions that inspired Jaclyn Jensen, Monika Gunty, and Pam Schilling to launch Driehaus’s new Rising Sophomore Success Program (RSSP).
Jensen serves as Driehaus’s Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs; Gunty, as the college’s Director of Undergraduate Advising. Schilling is the founder of Archer Career, which creates e-learning career programs. She’s also an alumna of DePaul’s Doctorate in Business Administration program, where her research helped form the foundation for her business.
They focused on the summer between freshman and sophomore year, a time when students are especially likely to transfer or even drop out of college altogether. They expanded the program to include transfer students, who face many of the same challenges — disconnection, uncertainty about where to turn for support — that lead returning students to drop out.
The team also included students from across the university, who brought their expertise in user experience design and artificial intelligence to bear.
This summer’s pilot program was intimate, bringing together 10 students for an up-close look at the experiences, worries, and hopes that rising sophomores bring to the table.
It laid the groundwork for the program to expand — not just in size but potentially to other areas as well.
The pilot program earned support from DePaul’s Vincentian Endowment Fund. This fall, the team’s efforts secured a prestigious Illinois Innovation Grant to take the project to the next level. Among their hopes: to build a model that could scale to other universities, positioning DePaul as a leading innovator in retention and career readiness.
In keeping with the team’s ambitions, the RSSP yielded a wealth of insights. How do you combine technology with a human touch? How do you meet students where they are at without losing touch with the norms of the working world? How do you rethink education, particularly how it happens, and where?
Read on for some of those insights, straight from RSSP team members and participants.
Pam Schilling (DBA ’19)
Meet students where they’re at — and take them where they want to go
“When it comes to career education, we’re competing with platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit,” explained Schilling.
An experienced technology executive and career coach, Schilling founded her company, Archer Career, with that central insight in mind.
Archer applies a learning strategy called “microlearning.” What once might have been a 45-minute video becomes a series of short clips. Videos are supplemented with hands-on, experiential activities and reflection questions.
All of it is designed with an understanding of the information ecosystem that today’s students inhabit.
“Because of the internet, people have a much bigger base of knowledge,” Schilling said. “You can look things up; you can accelerate your learning. Now with AI, this is exponentially greater.”
Schilling also sees her work as a bridge between the norms students are used to and the norms and expectations they’ll face as they enter their workforce.
“It’s about having some sensibility of what we need to adapt to,” Schilling said. “The content has to be interesting. But it also has to have a foot in the professional world. We are bridging from the world of college into the world of work. And that’s a delicate balance.”
Basmah Husain (BUS ’28)
Right skills, right place, right time
Using Schilling’s microlearning approach, the program explored a host of skills. Students learned how to handle stress, practiced time management, set financial goals, and developed their skills as leaders.
For transfer student Basmah Husain, these skills came at a critical time.
In the process of transferring from Oakton Community College to DePaul, Husain confronted a host of uncertainties. How would she navigate classes? How would she stay organized? How could she start preparing for her career?
RSSP gave her a framework to work through those questions. It also gave her somewhere to focus her energy.
“I realized that I was worrying about things I didn’t need to worry about,” she said. “As long as I got the planning part down,” she realized, “I would be fine.”
Today, Husain feels at home at DePaul. She attributes part of that to the community that RSSP brought together.
“It was really nice to have this community of people where I feel like I’m seen and heard,” she said. “It was really nice to see that there are people out there who are willing to take their time to help me. They were there for me when I needed it.”
Khizer Khan (CDM, CSH, ’27)
The unexpected nuances of developing soft skills
Khizer Khan is a math and computer science double major with a minor in finance. He worked for the program as a “secret shopper,” testing it out and identifying areas for improvement.
“I went into the program thinking I would know these skills because I’m an upperclassman,” he said. “That went out the door pretty quickly.”
For Khan, the biggest takeaway was just how much goes into developing — and applying — soft skills.
“People often don’t realize that soft skills aren’t just one skill,” he reflected. “It’s a bunch of things combined. If you want to have leadership, you need to have collaboration. You need to know how to talk to people; you need to know how to get people together and build teams.”
As a transfer student himself, Khan sees particular value in these resources reaching students early in their college careers.
“If this program was my introduction to DePaul, I think I would have been even better off,” he said. “There are so many lessons to learn; there are so many opportunities.”
Gargi Agarwal (CDM MS ’27)
Where mentorship experience and AI tools meet
Gargi Agarwal got to combine her experience as a mentor with her expertise in artificial intelligence
Each student in the program was paired with two mentors. One was a DePaul alum working in industry. The other was peer mentor Gargi Agarwal.
Agarwal is a student in DePaul’s M.S. in Artificial Intelligence program. She joined the RSSP as an experienced mentor; she helped train new employees in her previous role at Qualcomm and served as student body president in college.
In her job with the RSSP, Agarwal found an unexpected opportunity to combine her ethos as a mentor with her technological savvy.
She set up biweekly Zoom calls with program participants, keeping detailed notes about their summer jobs, their family milestones, and anything else that might affect how learning fits into their lives.
These calls, she realized, provided valuable data. How quickly a student responded to her emails; how nervous or confident they were in what they’d learned — all of this data could help home in on students who might need extra support.
Agarwal built a predictive model to do just that. With such a small sample size, her model will need refinement before it’s ready to be deployed. Still, Agarwal’s model creates further opportunities to scale the program without losing its personalized focus.
It’s also given Agarwal invaluable hands-on experience.
“With this project, I was able to use my AI skills for the first time,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting that. We were able to see the results; we were able to get predictions. Now I have knowledge about AI and predictive models, and I learned it hands-on.”
Ilse Castellanos Pulido (CDM MS ’26)
Balancing technology and personal connection
Ilse Castellanos Pulido brought her expertise in user experience design to her work as an intern on the project
Ilse Castellanos Pulido worked closely with Agarwal. Castellanos Pulido brought her expertise as an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction student to the table.
“I was thinking about this project from the perspective of a user experience designer,” she said. “How do students perceive this as their first touch point with the university? How do they evolve during the program? What patterns emerge in their behavior, and how can we design interventions that feel supportive rather than intrusive?”
Together with Agarwal, Castellanos Pulido focused on building a system of personalized “nudges.” Through user research and behavioral analysis, AI allowed Castellanos Pulido to observe each student’s login habits, then send encouraging messages at the times they were most likely to log in.
It’s this feature — the intersection between technology and personalization — that sums up the program for Castellanos Pulido.
“Having this balance between technology and personal connection made this experience more meaningful,” she said. “We validated our designs with real students and measured the impact. With this internship, I was able to prove to myself that you can apply human-centered design in the education field. We can build something special.”
Pam Schilling (DBA ’19)
Rethinking the college — and career — journey
When Pam Schilling talks about what she hopes to accomplish with RSSP and programs like it, she returns to the idea of college and career alike as a single, cohesive journey.
“Everything you do in college is cumulative. And fundamentally, I have a point of view that college is not just about the courses and the content,” she said.
So often, she added, “we don’t look at the job search as a process. We look at it as this random chain of events that you don’t have a lot of control over.”
Programs like RSSP — by equipping students, early on, with skills that are equally valuable in the classroom and the workplace — seek to change that.
In the process, Schilling believes such programs have the power to transform higher education.
“The thing we did with the rising sophomore program is that we’re not just putting the burden on one area of DePaul,” she said. “It’s not a career services problem. It’s not a faculty problem. It’s not an academic success problem. We really had the opportunity to centralize problem solving.”