Ask a Northwestern student what they do on campus and they will often launch into a long list of clubs and extracurriculars. But ask that student what they see themselves doing in five or 10 years, and the answer does not usually come as easily.

A new program for students in the School of Education and Social Policy aims to help students answer that question. Project Pause, the brainchild of two SESP alumni, is a weeklong retreat for rising seniors that combines service with reflection and leadership development programming.

“It’s a week for (SESP seniors) to reflect back on all their experiences, to slow down and see how far they’ve come in the past years,” said Kate McKenzie (SESP ’13), who co-pitched and will co-lead the program with fellow 2013 alumnus Fred Tye. “We hope it’ll help with figuring out what they want to do with their life and feeling better equipped to graduate.”

The weeklong retreat, which will pilot with six students in September, will emphasize “going slow to go fast,” or having students take time to think about who they are and what they want to do after graduation, Tye said. Students will follow a curriculum based on the role that self-awareness, mindfulness and emotional intelligence play in leadership development.

McKenzie and Tye, who both work at “Big Four” consulting firms, came up with the idea for Project Pause from their own conversations after graduation.

“Being able to reflect with each other is something we’ve both really benefited from,” Tye said. “We talked more and more about experiences we had in school that we could have benefited from if we’d had some sort of experience to talk to our peers and our professors about what the real world looked like, so we came up with the idea in the more structured format of a program and we pitched it to SESP.”

Tye and McKenzie reached out to their former SESP counselor, Megan Redfearn, who helped them pitch it to the SESP dean.

“I talked to alumni who come back after college and say, ‘I wish I’d had time to think more about some of the other options available to me,’ and I meet with a lot of students who are just like ‘I’m not sure what I want to do next,’” said Redfearn, an adviser for the Learning and Organizational Change program. “There are so many great and productive ways for students to use their time that reflection and that personal vulnerability piece often get pushed to the side in favor of more immediate things.”

The SESP alumni also drew from their experience co-leading an Alternative Spring Break trip to Mission: Wolf, a nonprofit wolf sanctuary two hours south of Colorado Springs where Project Pause will take place.

“Mission: Wolf is acting as a really rich learning environment for the themes we want to talk about with the students,” McKenzie said. “A lot of the camp day will be learning about Mission: Wolf — using that to echo that it’s a place where you have to slow down, because you can’t use technology and electricity is pretty scarce.”

Although the program is starting with a small group of SESP students, McKenzie said they hope to be able to grow it in the future.

“Our goal right now is just to do this camp as best we can, but the things we’re teaching and the concepts we’re focusing on are things anyone can benefit from — ideally it’s something more than just six SESP students can do,” McKenzie said.

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