Bucknell University’s Thrive Program fulfills the promise of the university’s strategic plan: to offer students a transformative experience that prepares them to thrive not only at Bucknell, but throughout their lives. The program is organized around four pillars — Meeting Basic Needs, Sense of Belonging, Access and Use of Resources, and Holistic Growth — a framework that generated over 300 university-wide initiatives to enhance the student experience. To date, more than 80% of those initiatives have been completed, including a Thrive Fellows Program, student success coaches, a First Generation Honor Society, a Thrive Course and one-day campus-wide Retreat, a redesigned new student orientation, and a grade forgiveness policy.

Building on the literature of entrepreneurial ecosystem mapping, Bucknell’s Ecosystem of Purpose creates a graphical representation of purpose opportunities on campus, maps the interconnectedness of components in terms of student participation, spaces, time, and resources, and conducts a gap analysis to guide future investment. Distinctively, this mapping is grounded in the student perspective rather than that of administrators. The program also develops Purpose Cards — short exercises used in Community Dialogues and in Bucknell’s Residential College Foundation and Dinner Seminar programs — to actively engage students in exploring their sense of purpose.

To learn more about Thriving at Bucknell, you can reach Joe Tranquillo, Associate Provost for Transformative Teaching and Learning and Professor of Biomedical and Electrical Engineering at jvt002@bucknell.edu.