Design Your Charleston is the College of Charleston’s integrated First-Year Experience and Life Design initiative. This initiative brings together a robust First-Year Experience program and a campus-wide Life Design initiative into a single curricular experience that reaches most incoming students from the very start of their college journey.

The centerpiece is FYSS 101, a redesigned peer-facilitated synthesis seminar linked to faculty-taught First-Year Experience courses. The seminar organizes the semester around five Life Design mindsets (Be Curious, Radically Collaborate, Take Action, Reframe, and Be Mindful), giving students a shared language for navigating challenges, building relationships, and making intentional choices. Through structured reflection, small experiments, and peer connection, students build a cumulative Cougar Pounce Plan portfolio documenting what they are learning about themselves, the community they are forming, and the actions they will take next. Trained undergraduate Peer Facilitators lead each section, supported by Life Design coaches who provide a familiar point of continued connection beyond the seminar, normalizing help-seeking and extending the work of the first year across the full undergraduate experience.

Design Your Charleston launched as a pilot in Fall 2026 with approximately 2,200 incoming first-year students, building on published research demonstrating significant improvements in participants’ hope for the future and goal-setting capacity. Assessment draws on validated instruments including the Claremont Purpose Scale and the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale, supplemented by rubric-based portfolio evaluation measuring growth in self-awareness, belonging, agency, reflection, and purpose.