The High Ed Skills You'll Need for an AI World

[0:00]  and one of the things that's super neat um when you think about Ben Franklin's life is that he never stayed in a Lane right it wasn't like he decided to be one thing and just stick with that he saw a young nation that had an awful lot of needs and he decided that you know what why not me right can try to figure out how to solve and in doing so Postal System fire department Library company first University like Diplomat like you name it and he was willing to just say why not me and that's the kind of attitude that I think is going to that that students these days they need to have because for the generation that's coming through school I think the Department of Labor estimates that they're going to have like 12 different jobs or careers by the time they're in their mid-40s and like

[0:47]  over half of them don't exist yet we're able to do is have like a really diverse range of countries like it's like over a 100 countries that are represented in our class all of the time but it's Al with the hope that their learning skills that are so transferable and applicable to their home country is that they're able to go back and immediately have an impact if that's what they choose to do we even talk about this with like native students so like native students who might come to pen and want to go back um you know that who who might live on reservations who are able to go back and immediately like through the School of Nursing like deliver health care right to their communities um and so it's it's both both both about I think having that like immediate local impact that was important to a student to bring back um

[1:37]  to their country to their you know their their place of origin but also to to think bigger right to redefine what maybe has been too narrowly defined prior all right everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle podcast now today is a very special episode because we are talking to a leader in um higher education specifically we are talking to the vice Dean and director of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania so one of the things that happens on this podcast is we have a lot of listeners who tune in who are either in the stages of getting

[2:26]  their children ready for college or we've got young leaders who are looking to take the next step after high school or maybe explore what higher education means to them in today's podcast we're really going to be taking a deeper dive into Jordan's mindset when it comes to the changing landscape of higher education we're going to talk about some of the growth skills from a growth mindset perspective that are so necessary when we get into higher education and how that can be beneficial for us we're going to talk about how higher education also plays a role in Readiness for the workforce the next stage after higher ed but we're also going to talk about some of the comparisons between the UK and how we do things here in the United States from a models perspective Jordan welcome to the show thank you so much Keenan I'm thrilled to be here this is going to be a great conversation I would love to um kind of give everybody a little bit of a

[3:13]  better understanding about the person who sits across from this digital table with me so you are the vice I'm sorry so you're the vice Dean and director of admissions at upen a prestigious organization let's talk a little bit about how you got into this position in the first place and then we'll kind of dive into the ation yeah so um how I be how you know how I found myself here is a little bit tied to how I found myself Philadelphian I went attended Temple University as an undergrad and I was the first in my family to attend college or university and um you know didn't think you know much about it but started to get really drawn to the idea of Education the power of education and the transformative aspects of education and after graduating

[4:00]  I was able to work with some of Philadelphia's beloved institutions and started to build a life here and I used to run through Penn's campus and thought oh my goodness I could I should really look into this I could see myself here and I started in the visit Center and anybody who's ever worked in admissions or as a college tour guide or something like that knows that everything happens in you know in the in the visit Center where all of the visitors come through and you learn so much and I also got to observe these folks who were known as admissions officers and they would be traveling everywhere and Global Studies was always a passion of mine and so I got into then international admissions and through international admissions I started to be able to have a perspective

[4:48]  that allowed me to contribute to strategy work um and then through the strategy work I became the associate dean of Recruitment and yield so thinking about how you take a staff and deploy them around the world to be able to increase access to higher education in the US and after a while I realized that in order to really appreciate and understand enrollment I needed to see things from the secondary school world so I spent a few years in secondary school leadership doing things like institutional research strategic initiatives enrollment management and then came back in uh halfway through 2020 and the reason I came back was because it was so obvious that this was an epic moment that was about to change

[5:35]  higher education forever uh that admissions so much of the processes that had existed before were just not going to work anymore in the face of changing testing policies uh historic increases in applications changes to the way students were even able to access certain things or spend their time and I needed a front row seat so I came back to higher education and um have you know been in the seat of being able to oversee our evaluation and selection process and now as director of admissions really thinking institution wide about all of these challenges that are facing not just pen but the entire higher education landscape and how you mobilize a Workforce to meet these

[6:25]  changing needs and demands and how you organiz yourself and what kind of skills do they need to do this and to continue to advance and increase access awareness and opportunity for youth I mean this is this is going to be an amazing conversation I'm incredibly excited about this because you had mentioned something with your International experience one of the things that popped into my mind was the way in which the world has evolved over the recent decade let's call it we went from a local community meaning when I was applying for college I was thinking like many of my other friends which St University am I going to go to but once the pandemic occurred we all started becoming more digitally connected in the way in which I kind of quantify that is we became a global Community very quickly with access on online education being able to

[7:14]  apply for universities and be able to attend there take advantage of online opportunities that changed the landscape of how people really appreciated and approached higher education from my perspective sitting out in society let's kind of talk about some of those key ropes or strings that were pulled during the pandemic which made you say I want to come back and sit here because this space is changing let's kind of talk about that a little bit Yeah so there's you know there was a really there's a traditional model to the way that admissions offices were typically organized where you know people saw their identity in the profession usually first through this lens of a very narrow Geographic Focus so if you pulled any admissions officer you know around the country and you said okay you know what do you do they would usually start by saying something like I work with you

[8:01]  know two counties in New Jersey the state of Michigan and parts of California and that was how they saw their identity but the way that not just like Mobility right changed and you know people could you know be engaged in a Workforce here but live here or people might have make different people made different decisions about where to go to school during that time period based on you know how they found their ability to adapt to online learning some people thrived in that many people didn't right and so families sought districts or places where they were able to have a little bit more inperson instruction and also you couldn't visit campuses and

[8:49]  colleges couldn't come and visit you and your high school so everybody overnight had to figure out how to virtually bring you know that that information to folks and so when a like I think quickly everybody saw oh wait a second this is actually working this is actually reaching people people are actually from like you know their own homes able to like visit 10 schools in a night um it really changed things and in order to you know to to that required being much more you know intentional about the kinds of information that you were sharing how do you make this engaging how do you not sound like everything else and how do you convey practical advice that helps convert that you know

[9:37]  watch of a video or that click on a website to action um so people just started asking questions that were part of things that maybe they were taking a little bit for granted I think prior um and then also this was happening at a time where there was an awful lot of increase in applications that was happening and A disruption of plans right like you had students like graduating being like wait a second the world is closed do I want to jump right into college or university or am I going to take a gap year and so there were just so many things that even if you were an institution that had really stable enrollment patterns prior to that you would have to honest answer honestly like if you're president or proposer whoever it was asked you what was going to happen you would kind of have to say you know I'm not sure we've never seen

[10:25]  this before you know one of the things that I thought was really remark able about our previous conversation together you talked about the Strategic choice and intentionality to remove Majors from the application process let's kind of talk about the rationale behind that and why that's so pivotal for meeting these New Perspective students and individuals where they're at and what do that set up like for their expiration of what they want to accomplish yeah so pen has a unique problem but that kind of led us to think creatively about how to solve it and what Penn's unique problem is is that when you apply as an undergraduate you've got to choose among our four undergraduate schools or coordinated degree programs as where you want to where you want to start like where's going to be like where you earn your de degree through at the University of

[11:13]  Pennsylvania and we also are you fortunate to have kind of Ben Franklin as an important character in our Legacy as the founder of pen and one of the things that's super neat um when you think about Ben Franklin's life is that he never stayed in in a Lane right it wasn't like he decided to be one thing and just stick with that he saw a young nation that had an awful lot of needs and he decided that you know what why not me right like why not me I can try to figure out how to solve and in doing so Postal System fire department Library company first University like Diplomat like you name it and he was willing to just say why not me and that's the kind of attitude that I think is going to that that students these days they need

[12:00]  to have because for the generation that's coming through school I think the Department of Labor estimates that they're going to have like 12 different jobs or careers by the time they're in their mid-40s and like over half of them don't exist yet so you can't be in a you can't be waiting for somebody to show you how it's been done before right and if it doesn't exist yet well then how do you know what you want to major in um and then the other part of that was that even of the students who did think that they knew what they wanted to major in and who weren't coming in undecided they you know in each of our undergraduate schools especially in our College of Arts and Sciences the liberal arts Hub and home of the University we were finding upwards of 80% of students were changing their mind so that means

[12:48]  that when you ask somebody at 16 17 18 you know they're only answering that question based on what they already know and that's only like the tip of the iceberg of what they're about to get exposed to right so in order to reflect that and that need to be adaptable changeable and to have exposure to a lot of different subject areas and do it in a way that reflected the curriculum of pen which encourages exploration um we were like you know what we've got to stop asking this question because when we ask the question students in high school like they come at it from the question they've been asked since a young age which is what do you want to be when you grow up and so they narrowly tailor you know their vision of themselves at

[13:38]  college or university to something that may or may not be true right and that it's it's only a part of their interests and there's so much more to that to uncover so we were really excited to take away you know even asking students what they wanted to major in because it allowed them to talk more fully about all of their interests instead of thinking that they had to prove um you know that they were qualified for some future profession that may or may not exist what was your academic undergrad career like did you change majors at all were you an Explorer like benen Franklin what was that like yeah so I went in kind of wanting to you know to have a handle on the world but I didn't know how to do that because they didn't offer um in

[14:26]  international studies or international relations Focus and what I ended up studying was a yeah a combination of things that I I didn't really see coming I was a political science major who picked up American studies as a minor and then who also picked up Italian as a minor because I got the the joy of studying abroad um you know as an undergrad and I think that there's something to be said about the the truth of most people's experience is that that's kind of the thing about life is you know you can't control it fully and you can't you know you've got to be if you're doing it right you should be changing you should be evolving there should be things that are are taking you to the next and the next and the next and there should be this element of growth out there and what's interesting is that um the

[15:14]  college admissions application process tends to suggest to high schoolers that they've got to come into it as a fully formed unchanging human being I mean I think about um a couple of my personal examples of that I also jumped around a lot when I was picking my major exercise in sports science to get started Communications major then I transferred to UNLV University Of The B Las Vegas and I was like I really want to try out this mechanical engineering thing and tried that out and I was like wait the math is really crazy here I don't know if I'm be able to do this so I went back to Communications and sociology and so it's like one of the things that I think a lot of people misunderstand today is that from my personal perspective I look at higher education as an exploration and more so an enablement platform that allows for you to taste certain things the objective is not to Simply add rule in a

[16:01]  school go to class go back to your dorm study study study go back to class do the same thing but it's also exploring different cultures different ideas you don't know what you're passionate about until you truly taste things and I can't tell you how many other individuals I grew up with boys and girls whose parents told them at a young age you're going to be a a patent attorney but nobody even knew what that means you know what I mean and it's so funny to hear you say that we expect these high school students to come out as fully formed humans that are never going to change but yet when we graduate from high school 17 18 years old we're having to raise our hand to go to the bathroom but then one month later when we're going to school they're like what path are you gonna pick it's like I don't know if I'm ready for this responsibility which is really crazy to kind of think about right completely completely and that's the thing is that um you know pen for better or worse you know part of my job is to unfortunately

[16:52]  deliver disappointing news to tens of thousands of students every year and I always try to emphasize that when I'm talking to groups of students is that look the fact that you're showing this investment in your future this interest in your future to even seek this information to apply to put yourself out there keep that keep that fire right keep that like self- advocacy keep that in sense of initiative because that's all you need right it doesn't matter where you go you're there's no other point in your life where your only job is to take advantage of every opportunity in front of you for four years right and that you've got a whole team of people trying to help you do that and so it you know the disappointment over like oh I got a no from here but a yes from here but a no

[17:41]  from here like that's not what it's about right it's not the institution that's going to define those next four years it's really going to be you um and I always try to emphasize that with students yeah I mean the end product is you as the individual the experiences the skills that you bring the skills that you accomplish and H I would say you know are able to cultivate within yourself you are the end product and all of these experiences kind of lead to that bigger picture I want to Pivot a little bit to talk about parent involvement it's interesting yesterday as I was doing a little bit of prep for this conversation I saw a post on Instagram or maybe it was LinkedIn I think it was LinkedIn that uh said one and four Millennials or gen Z I'm so sorry one and four gen Z today have parents that are involved in both their college application process or are involved interviews as well so I want to

[18:31]  kind of talk about this changing landscape that we're seeing a lot of parent involvement in areas of professionalism and higher education that maybe we didn't see before what are you kind of seeing out there yeah I I I think that that tracks with my you know anecdotal observations um I think that uh it is I have to laugh because every year you know around movement time there are always parents that ask like well where's the housing for the parents and we're like uh back where you came from yeah um I so I mean on one hand it's not surprising because I think that you know districts and schools like it's it's well known right that like parental involvement in education improves Student Success right and so to see that kind of like you know

[19:20]  but you don't teach parents how to wean off of that either right you know it's like so it's it's it's it's kind of understandable that you see that like trickle into to you know beyond maybe the K through 12 years um but it's also you know the affordability element right is that college is expensive and it's a complicated like how are we going to afford this as a family how am I going to AFF this as a student what is this debt going to mean for me like you've got to have that family conversation and so I think that parents they you know there there's there's a way to kind of um appropriately I think be you know be involved and a lot of that does include like kind of putting putting boundaries around it because there's a difference between asking questions trying to draw

[20:08]  stuff out of your you know your student your child that helps them feel confident in this moment I always you know when I was in the secondary school world I was so grateful for that experience because you really see firsthand how in this K through2 environment we're on this pathway where we're trying so hard to like build these young people up build these young people up and then it ends with this weird process that totally decimates student confidence right like it totally like starts to make them doubt themselves starts to make them question are they enough like are they going to get admitted like all of these things and I think that parents serve the strongest role when they help put this process in perspective by not elevating it to a level that it needs to be by not making

[20:58]  it this all and all by not making it like you know tied to a specific outcome at a specific institution and helping to reduce the anxiety and the pressure that I think Society has really built around this and helping them find their confidence right like helping them because the last thing you want is a young person to go in then to that next step of college or university feeling totally on Shaky Ground like feeling not confident feeling like you know they they've lost all sense of self like so I think that parents if they could keep their focus there that would be awesome I think sometimes however there is a tendency to actually fuel the reverse of that um and and you know whenever we do have the opportunity to kind of like

[21:45]  remind parents our dean of admissions does a great job of this through some of her work in the media and everything but it definitely there's there's a role that parents have in this and it's probably not what they initially think it is I mean let's let's talk a little bit about cultivating a mindset for growth specifically we said we were going to talk about the growth mindset here and I feel like this is a perfect transition into growth mindset let's kind of talk about that from your perspective and why it's so important to help students Embrace if you will failure and discomfort through this process of growth as they become the full version of themselves yeah um so I think that the reality is is that um again like experience is what usually leads to our our lessons like and that

[22:34]  that requires you know things happening you being in different situations you being stretched or challenged in different ways and there's not really a way to like avoid that gaining of knowledge without experiences and what why it's so important is because no matter how good of a student you were or how on top of your game you were in high school college is just going to be different and guess what after college it's going to be even more different and then every s job situation life situation that you find yourself it's going to draw from you something different and being curious about that instead of you know afraid of that and being um willing to engage fully with that um and not be too attached to like you know

[23:26]  one aspect of it but instead we always like to kind of remind students like calm seas never make for an exciting Journey like nobody wants to read a book where like somebody just like you know Lake yeah and and it was great yeah um so thinking about like at pen one of the things that we emphasize to student is that we kind of do use a little bit of UNF franklinisd you know clay pots that were on the floor before that base got created you know there was you know before every great discovery there was so many like just ah I'm never GNA get there I'm never going to get that breakthrough like and that's where the great comes

[24:14]  from like that's where you know that that that passion comes from you learn so much more about the times that didn't go right and it's really hard for us to convince students of that so first term advisors and all sorts of folks are spending an awful lot of amount of energy trying to get a group of high achieving young people who were used to kind of like school not being all that hard for them sometimes you know because they were those students that you know that did well well now you're in a place where that's everybody and what do they do they default into kind of you know patterns or routines where but achieving is is how I got here to begin with whereas now this is different now this

[25:01]  is like really being part of the creation right of new knowledge and new experiences and so what you're being asked to do is totally different and it should feel weird and so we need students to like get okay with that because um it's much more about you know like well then how do you get back up from that time that it was challenging or it didn't go as planned not oh my goodness try to avoid it being challenging or trying or avoid it not going to plan I mean I think about um the process of growth is beautiful you are going to come across in life so many challenges where you feel like you're not enough you're going to come across so many opportunities where you think you did a good job but it just didn't live up to that but it's in those opportunities to reflect where we find

[25:48]  personal growth I was and I talked about this in our previous conversation I was never a huge advocate for Education it just never really vibed with me I was never that amazing student always appreciated the education process but I knew that there were things that were on the other side and after I graduated from school I really found myself falling in love with learning for the first time because I was able to apply skills I was able to learn about the growth mindset I was able to learn about positive psychology on how they really kind of would create a foundation for me to be successful at the next level and I feel like when we have institutions and leaders like you who are literally trying to get those things earlier into the growth process I feel like you're just literally setting up a foundation for these students and these individuals to be so much more successful in life if they can embody that growth mindset those positive psychological elements

[26:37]  because I mean let's be real Jordan how many times have you come across times where you've been disappointed but then opportunities have come on the other side of that no or the other side of failure right yeah yeah exactly exactly and you don't believe it right until until you go through it and that's why kind of not having you know not giving into like that instinct to close off but instead to open yourself in those moments is is is what we you know we hope for for students on the application itself we've tried this in different ways we actually introduced a couple years ago and it it's my favorite thing ever I love it so much it's a short answer gratitude prompt and what that is is that um the very first question they have to answer for our application is write a short thank you note to someone you haven't had the pro the chance to

[27:25]  properly thank yet and if you can share it with them right and part of that is a so that they experience the wellness benefit of expressing gratitude at a time when they could probably use that when they're a little stressed the other is we love to just sit back sometimes and think about the ripple effect of almost 70,000 people putting positive energy and gratitude into the universe when they're applying um but also mostly it's because that moment of the application is the most Raw unscripted genuine honest part that we see of a student they don't overthink it they don't ask a coach to help them with it they didn't even think about turning to AI to write it you know like they just something came to them and that emotion

[28:16]  created that response and you usually learn something that's so lovely about the way they can consider others the way that they can see like the world as bigger than themselves um and we hope that by putting that first they stay in that kind of head space as they go through the rest of the rest of the application gratitude is an amazing thing there's a an amazing study that um on a podcast I'm not sure if you ever heard of Andrew huberman but he talked about the power of gratitude and he said you know showing gratitude is one thing but receiving gratitude on the other side of that is multiplicative and I thought that was a really interesting perspective because how often are you actually shown gratitude for things that

[29:04]  you've done for other people you know I feel like it's very easy for us in this world to get into the mode of yeah you know I take care of other people but I never really see how it comes back around and yes that's putting gratitude out so what if the University of Penn was able to have some of those answers that went out to grandma or that person who worked with them during the summer time imagine how powerful it would be to know that somebody in the moment of thinking about their higher education process was thinking about you and the things that maybe they were never able to experience or express to you that would be so cool so what well that's what we put in the prompt is we tell the students that if they are able to they they they should deliver this because that exactly it ties to the research you know Adam Grant Angela Duckworth Marty Seligman like all of them have weighed in and been like yeah but it's the action of delivering the gratitude that brings the benefit and we get so many

[29:52]  emails um even from parents like there was there was one that I I just totally remember uh that where the the parent reached out and was like my child wrote this to her sister you don't understand they're two teenagers who have been fighting so terribly for years as parents we had no idea that this is how they felt about each other and it led to such a beautiful moment in our household we don't even care if she gets admitted just thank you for this that uh it's it's I'm gonna have to take like a deep breath because it like makes me feel emotional very transparently because often we just like don't show the gratitude that we have for other people and literally as you were talking there I was thinking about me and my sister had a really rocky relationship in high school I'm 3 years older than her two grades ahead and we went to different high schools and stuff like that and we

[30:40]  were just on different pages and I went away to um Conway South Carolina to go to Coastal Carolina University when I graduated from high school and I'll always remember literally as I'm sitting here I'm G try not to tear up I looked at my phone and looked at the notes in my phone and she had written this really heartfelt just like letter of like how much she appreciated me and for the first time I heard that from her mouth other than her telling me the things that I wasn't doing right or not being a big brother and stuff like that and that's something that like just sat with me and I hope I still have that note somewhere in my phone um but that was just like such an amazing experience but it kind of talks exactly about the multiplicative effect and I apologize for getting kind of like worked up here um but it's true you know I mean when other people show gratitude for you especially when they're people who are so close to us but they don't have the

[31:27]  time time to express it or that free space um it creates so many um just impacts in our lives and so thank you for making this something that's really real for me today um I wantan to I want to talk next about you know when we first started talking together in our Discovery conversation I had mentioned that you had just gotten back from the UK where you had met with 27 other universities and we talked about the differences in culture and higher education why don't we kind of break that down for the audience let's talk about some of the differences that you observed yeah it's interesting the United Kingdom right um from a position of uh education has just such a rich history and is a place where so many students from so many different backgrounds have sought education because of its boarding school culture right um you know and they have there's

[32:16]  such a concentration and saturation of such really great top quality schools um that it's interesting because so often there's like there system of Education um you know you've got your your well I don't know people out there follow Harry Potter like the owls system was actually based on the true a-level system but um so people take their wide range of subjects and then they narrow right they start to think about well what is it that I'm good at what is it that I might want to do what is it that I'm going to want to apply to University for and so then they go from like having like a roster of like nine subjects or so down to only like three and so you're leaving with your last two years of really only focused on like three subject areas and you chose them because

[33:06]  of a particular concentration that you now want to have in college or university and yeah this is totally different when you're talking about the American liberal arts based system where the whole point is like you're probably wrong about what you think you want to do and you don't know yet what you want to do and you've got to explore and interdisciplinary learning and stuff and so it's it's interesting because only until the information got more and more easy to access for students and families out there did Comfort start to rise with you know being able to consider the United States and then also as time fee structure changed with the British universities right so it kind of wasn't as like tremendous a difference of you know

[33:54]  of cost and consideration so people started to look towards the United States and it's just led to this like demand for information right whereas there only used to be a handful of schools that really sent students to the United States now everyone's asking and you know there's all sorts of range of students even who attend what you know would be considered like you know like public or national schools um who are able to access this information and who are interested in this type of learning and the experience that American higher education offers as an alternative to that specialization that early specialization and that narrowly tailored academic experience it's interesting um I I speak to in another podcast that I host um to a lot of Business Leaders and we talk about

[34:42]  Innovation um the topic of the future of work is really interesting because we talk about how we're going to be able to innovate in this space a lot of companies today are seeing a lot of success in leveraging a global talent pool rather than just a local talent pool which I feel like is something that really curious leaders are going to be able to take advantage of early here in these next couple years because it creates so much more opportunity to be able to gather Talent when I hear you talking about an international pool or community of students you are in a completely different game now being able to attract students from Europe in Asia and everywhere else who can come do you think that's going to have a bigger impact on kind of how these students think about the future of work and how we formulate companies because of their exposure to so many different types of cultures and people from around the world does that make sense yeah yeah it

[35:29]  does I mean I think that that's the hope you know pen has a long history of being able to enroll students from around the world pen was one of the first institutions to really you know step into that and so what we're able to do is have like a really diverse range of countries like it's like over a hundred countries that are represented in our class all of the time but it's also with the hope that their learning skills that are so transferable and applicable to their home country is that they're able ble to go back and immediately have an impact if that's what they choose to do we even talk about this with like native students so like native students who might come to pen and want to go back um you know that who who might live on reservations who are able to go back and immediately like through the School of Nursing like deliver health care right

[36:16]  to their communities um and so it's it's both about I think having that like immediate local impact that was important to a student to bring back to their country to their you know their their place of origin but also to to think bigger right to redefine what maybe has been too narrowly defined prior I want to I want to talk a little bit about how technology is going to kind of impact this generation that's currently in higher education so you know over the last couple years we've seen the explosion if you will of things like AI chat gbt has become very prominent technology automation all of these things are out here and what they've represented is kind of a commoditization of a lot of the hard skills if you will being able to write a document being able to do this type of

[37:03]  stuff but there's a real emphasis now on soft skills emotional intelligence empathy curiosity yeah how are you thinking about the role of upen as being an enablement platform to help people explore these soft skills and why they're so important in the future yeah so I can talk about this with our staff uh first and foremost is that you know the way that we even organized ourselves is to better reflect the needs of enr enrollment leaders in the future and typically this was just you know you you had to learn how to evaluate files and you had to learn how to go on the road and recruit no you've actually really got to learn how to like that you know you got to practice discernment you've got to practice judgment you've got to practice speaking you've got to practice um you know engaging with different audiences you've got to practice

[37:50]  analysis and you know leveraging data and so we organize ourselves now instead of around that traditional like you know specific narrowly focused Geographic model around skills um and then similarly that I think is reflected in the curricula structure for students at pen right is this idea of how are we supplementing uh student learning not just through the academic program they're part of but what centers hubs community Resource Centers cultural resource centers research centers are you know are are there for them to connect with and further practice in a different way you know the applicability of what they're learning I mean one of the things that I think about is a huge opportunity is the transference of

[38:38]  knowledge right transference of knowledge means I mean I was talking to another leader from Ohio State a couple weeks ago and he was talking about the education process has completely changed from when I went to school normally you would come and sit at the feet of Faculty they would exchange information and then hopefully something good would happen in the future but what I think about when you were talking there is your staff and team represents a skilled individual who truly represents what it takes to be skilled and successful in the future and if you have transference of knowledge and just like the transference of spending time together the students will be able to pick up on those soft skills and they'll be able to adopt those things that they see from leaders of the institution who can then show them the right way to be able to act and to behave and to just be great individuals which helps them be successful later yeah that's the hope I mean I think that college is still you

[39:26]  know it's the time where you kind of you push boundaries you learn your place in the world you figure it out and um making it so that students are able to do that in a way that lets them chart their own course and Forge their own path um is is is something that I think you know Penn's able to do well I mean it's amazing um Jordan this has been such a blessing to be able to sit across this digital table and just get take a deeper dive into the perspective of a leader like you who's truly helping our next generation to explore really what it means to develop that growth mindset put them in situations of being uncomfortable helping them develop the skill sets that are necessary for them to be successful at the next level it's just an amazing conversation I want to uh kind of pull our episode to a halt here by putting a bow on this by having my previous guest

[40:15]  yeah ask you a question all right so they wanted to ask you and this is really interesting for you how do you balance the need for results with the well-being of your team members yeah this is a big one and especially hit home as we struggle with application increases um and I think that knowing what your non-negotiables are right like that when it comes to your your you know your wellbe as individuals as a team like what are going to be your non-negotiables so that then you can spend all of your creative energy trying to solve in a way that preserves them and that is something that has led to a lot of innovation um but also it gets you in the position to

[41:05]  be able to say no and that's uh really important well I can't thank you once again for everybody who's been tuning in today this has been another amazing episode of the heart and hustle podcast once again Jordan thank you for joining us we really appreciate it thank you so much everybody we'll catch you in the next one