A professional actor, singer and producer, Ryder McDaniel (Communication ’24), spends almost every day applying the skills he learned at Northwestern to his career — and not just the ones he learned from his theatre major.
As an undergraduate, McDaniel completed NU’s Curious Life Certificate, a personal development program housed in the McCormick School of Engineering. He said the certificate gave him a better understanding of his emotional intelligence, a skill that has helped him in collaborative, high-stress situations.
As the program’s first-ever graduate, he learned how to evaluate his life comprehensively by taking classes that encouraged both qualitative and quantitative considerations of his experiences. In one of his courses, he discussed emotional awareness and coping strategies in a small group setting.
“It was providing almost like an engineer’s blueprint to have an emotionally productive conversation in conflict,” he said.
Launched in the 2023-24 school year, the Curious Life Certificate addresses a variety of factors related to personal development, which has a high correlation with an individual’s well-being. Studies from the American Psychologist and Frontiers in Psychology suggest that individuals who lack skills closely related to personal development — including meaningful goal-setting, relationship building and a growth mindset — are more prone to mental health issues, including depression and anxiety.
According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety are the most common mental health disorders worldwide. A 2024 study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the prevalence of depression symptoms jumped from 18.5% to 21.4%, and anxiety symptoms from 15.6% to 18.2% between 2019 and 2022.
McCormick Prof. Joseph Holtgreive (McCormick ’88) holds a master’s in education with a concentration in adult development and counseling. He said he has seen students struggle with self-management and personal direction in his 32 years of teaching at NU.
The rise of social media has also “hijacked” deliberate attention and the ability to form healthy connections, said David Shor, a clinical psychologist and adjunct lecturer for one of the certificate’s courses.
Sensations, emotions and stories
Holtgreive created McCormick’s Office of Personal Development in 2007 to help students combat struggles related to personal development. He also co-founded the Personal Development StudioLab in 2022 with McCormick Prof. Bruce Ankenman (TGS ’24). Through these initiatives, Holtgreive said he hopes to help students develop the confidence to perform effectively academically and throughout their lives.
The certificate emerged from the Personal Development StudioLab, and “formalizes” the lab’s focus on curiosity, Holtgreive said. It recognizes three channels through which individuals connect to their lives: physical sensations, emotions and stories. He added that encouraging students to devote attention to and interact with these channels ensures they spend their energy in productive ways and are aware of how they do so.
The certificate includes three required courses: Personal Academic Tactical Help; Emotional Intelligence 101: Managing Yourself, Maximizing Your Potential; and Designing Your Life. Students must also complete one physical sensations course of their choice, with options such as partner dancing, yoga and acting, and one stories course, including options like improv, literature and storytelling.
For Weinberg senior Lucy Munro, the courses led her to introspection and made decisions about her future easier, she said.
“At a university (where) everyone holds themselves to such a high standard, people forget how important it is to focus on themselves and not only on their happiness, but their goals, and what they truly want and what they enjoy,” she said.
Ankenman said NU’s academic mission does not place enough emphasis on helping students develop their own lives. This pattern is something he has noticed at other universities and is a gap in education that the certificate seeks to address, he said.
“I feel that the University has not truly included the personal development of their students in their overall mission,” he said.
Off-campus influences
Some of the principles taught through the Curious Life Certificate reflect logic from other programs around the country.
Ankenman, who holds an M.A. in Counseling, started NU’s iteration of the Designing Your Life course, an idea that originated from a conversation between two Stanford University professors in 2007. Former McCormick Dean Julio Ottino advocated for the course’s presence at NU almost a decade later, in 2016.
Bellevue College in Bellevue, Washington, offers similar for-credit classes on stress management, strategies for student success and assertive communication, among other topics.
“These are the classes that help students be successful not just in their other classes but also just to be successful in their lives,” said Dr. Steven Martel, a licensed clinical psychologist and chair of the college’s Counseling Center and Human Development curriculum.
Faculty at Bellevue incorporate research on mindfulness, meditation and cognitive behavior therapy into the stress management class. They use research on attachment theories in a personal relationships class.
Yet, approaching these disciplines through graded classes with the aim of personal development is not common practice throughout U.S. colleges and universities. Other top schools, like Harvard University, offer a variety of personal and professional development courses, but they focus on business leadership and digital innovation rather than personal wellness. McHenry County College offers more similar topics, but via virtual, non-credit courses.
Martel added that teaching these disciplines through higher education courses affords students both academic and personal benefits. They can receive grades and credit while also experiencing a shared learning environment in which they can be vulnerable and make positive changes to their lives. He added that he does not want the courses to add stress to students’ lives.
Psychological grounding
Many of the strategies and approaches taught in these courses are rooted in psychological principles.
Shor worked as a Counseling and Psychological Services staff member and director of clinical services for almost 25 years. As he and his colleagues discussed what students weren’t getting from their learning, but could benefit from, they recognized the importance of emotional intelligence.
He set about writing the curriculum for Emotional Intelligence 101, which ran for the first time in 2012 and was later incorporated into the certificate.
Some of the class’ curriculum draws on Reuven Bar-On’s model of emotional intelligence, developed from a self-report measure called the Emotional Quotient Inventory. The EQ-i has five scales that measure intrapersonal, interpersonal, stress management, adaptability and general mood areas to identify areas of strength and weakness.
Shor said he uses the EQ-i 2.0, an updated version of this assessment, as a pre- and post-test for course effectiveness. Generally, he sees student scores improve between half and two-thirds of a standard deviation across overall emotional intelligence in each of the modules.
He also sees some student scores decrease, but he does not chalk this negative change up to a lack of effective learning. Shor said some students felt the need to fake certain good qualities, and others have explained that in the pre-test, they see themselves either having or not having a quality, but in the post-test, are able to see more “shades of gray.”
“Even when the scores go down, people are expressing that that happened as a result of ways that they know themselves better and feel more accepting and comfortable with themselves,” he said.
Other concepts mirror work done in therapy, including tools for stress management.
Similarly, for Designing Your Life, Ankenman incorporates activities and readings from a book by the same name, written by the Stanford professors who originally crafted the course. Ankenman said he largely develops the curriculum based on research and ideas from therapy and philosophy about navigating life and relationships.
Ilene Cohen, a marriage and family therapist, said she has noticed a trend in younger people being too hyper-focused on personal wellness. She distinguished between working on oneself out of curiosity and anxious hyperfixation. The latter leads people to apply words like “trauma” to situations that don’t actually represent that, she added.
“It’s great to take a look, but make sure it’s coming from a more curious place, wanting to grow and not from this place of, ‘Oh, everything has to be perfect,’” she said.
Making meaning in a new phase of life
College presents a unique moment where individuals start differentiating from their families and establish independence and new relationships, Cohen said. Personal development and self-reflection help students explore their own needs and which aspects of their family culture they want to continue. This is especially important because people learn conflict-resolution and communication strategies from their families, but not every family sets a model example, she said.
However, these courses are only a short intervention — what students get out of them is what they put in, Shor said. There are strategies for long-term implementation, such as turning a mindfulness practice like meditation into a habit, but it is up to the students’ own agency.
Ankenman echoed this, adding that not every approach and interaction will resonate with students, despite professors’ emphasis on personal engagement. As some classes have several dozen students, Ankenman said he also cannot devote as much attention as he would like to each individual.
“It’s inherent in any process that it’s not perfect, and we don’t expect that it’s perfect,” he said. “We think that what we’re doing is a vast improvement over not having classes that even address this topic.”
Currently, 22 students are registered for the Curious Life Certificate, and 11 have completed it, according to University data. Although the certificate is housed in McCormick, Holtgreive said he would love to see more students across disciplines take advantage of it.
Ankenman, too, hopes that more undergraduates will get involved with the program and that graduate programs might adopt some of its ideas.
“I’ve seen such amazing changes in students even just in 10 weeks,” Ankenman said. “If the Curious Life Certificate doesn’t become huge and the Personal Development Lab doesn’t become huge, I know that there’s lots and lots of individual people out there that have been helped and that really is the thing that I’m mostly trying to do.”
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