Meant To Live

Proposal type: Vocation Newsletter

The Meant to Care: PLU School of Nursing Alumni Spotlight Newsletter will celebrate the vocational journeys of PLU nursing alumni who embody the university’s mission of educating for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care. Rooted in the Wild Hope Center for Vocation’s mission to nurture purposeful living and discernment, this initiative will strengthen the School of Nursing’s culture of vocation-centered learning by connecting alumni stories to the professional formation of current students.

Nursing is inherently vocational—anchored in compassion, service, and justice. Through structured digital storytelling, this project will invite alumni to share how their sense of calling has developed throughout their lives and careers. Each quarterly issue will feature one alumna/us who reflects on key moments of discernment, resilience, and transformation, illustrating how vocation is a lifelong process of aligning one’s values, skills, and purpose in the service of others.

The newsletter will highlight the diversity of nursing pathways, featuring alumni serving in hospital leadership, community health, education, research, and policy. Their stories will demonstrate that vocation in nursing extends beyond bedside care to include advocacy, mentorship, and systemic change. These reflections will help students explore questions central to their professional identity, such as: What does it mean to be called to care? How can one sustain meaning and balance amid the demands of healthcare? How do our personal values shape our work and our leadership?

For alumni, this project offers a meaningful opportunity for reflection and reconnection with the PLU community. For students, it provides accessible and inspiring examples of how vocation can be lived out in varied contexts—affirming that nursing is not simply a profession but a lifelong calling to foster healing, justice, and human flourishing.

Ultimately, Meant to Care will serve as a bridge between generations of PLU nurses, cultivating a living community of vocational storytelling that reinforces the School of Nursing’s commitment to compassionate leadership and reflective practice. By celebrating our alumni’s ongoing discernment and service, we affirm that vocation is at the heart of what it means to be both a nurse and a Lute.

Proposal type: Poster and Digital Screen Series

This project, led by the Physics Department, in collaboration with the Astronomy Club, Engineering Club, and Physics majors, seeks to strengthen vocational exploration and alumni–student connections through a student-researched and student-designed poster series. Current students will contact graduates from our department to learn about their vocational journeys—how they discovered their callings, navigated detours, and found meaning in their careers and lives. Students will ask alumni to share a current photo or an image that reflects their work. These stories will be transformed into six posters,
designed by Dr. Hay in collaboration with the students, themed around “Where Are They Now and Why?”

The posters will be displayed in our physics study lounge, a central gathering space for our majors. The posters will serve both as a reminder that vocation is a lifelong process and as encouragement that alumni have navigated uncertainties, changes, and flourishing lives after PLU.

Importantly, this project centers on relationships—between alumni and students, and among students themselves as they collaborate across clubs and year level, creating natural mentorship between upper- and intro-level students. Alumni voices will show current students that vocation is not just about securing employment but about living into meaningful callings that serve others and contribute to human and ecological flourishing.

The grant money will go to the student clubs for them to renovate the physics study lounge, allowing students to create a more welcoming environment. The current space is only desks, chairs, and overhead fluorescent lighting. With warmer lighting, a comfortable couch, newer chairs, and NetVUE conversation card decks, the lounge will become not just a study space, but a place where vocation can be discussed and discerned in community.

Proposal type: Vocational Journey Podcast Series

The Mathematics Department is proposing to create 3-5 podcast episodes featuring interviews between current students and alumni. For years, alumni panels were part of our capstone class, but as the capstone course has evolved in recent years, we are rethinking how to connect students with alumni. These podcasts, featuring alumni careers and experiences, will help address student uncertainty regarding career paths—a concern often voiced in end-of-degree surveys. We plan to play episodes in our capstone class, and share them on our department webpage and with prospective and current majors. 

Our discipline is well-positioned to address the Wild Hope mission statement. Mathematician  Francis Su writes, “So if you asked me: why do mathematics? I would say: mathematics helps people flourish. Mathematics is for human flourishing.” He writes about five desires people have—play, beauty, truth, justice, and love—and argues that practicing mathematics helps us fulfill those desires. These ideas are directly related to how PLU understands vocation. We have many alumni whose mathematical backgrounds support human and ecological flourishing, and we believe that their stories will inspire current and future students. 

Our intent is for our current majors and minors to be involved in all steps of the podcast creation process. We will send out a call for students interested in creating the podcasts, as interviewers and/or as editors. The students will be compensated for their work. We will match students with alumni based on their interests both in mathematics and type of work  (e.g., academia, industry, non-profit, sustainability, biostatistics). Creating the podcasts will be part of our current students’ vocational journeys and discernment.  

To ensure that the podcasts are of high quality and align with the mission of Wild Hope, we will hold an informational meeting with all interviewers to go over the principles of Lutheran  Higher Education and to discuss some possible interview questions (e.g., How do you deal with ethical concerns in your field? How does your work contribute to the community?). We assume that these will be semi-structured interviews, where there will be a set of prepared questions, but students will be able to ask follow-up questions as well.

Proposal type: Alumni Panel and Networking Reception

Students who major in psychology are predisposed to resonate with the mission of PLU’s Wild Hope Center for Vocation. Some can articulate it explicitly, others cannot. But even without necessarily having the language to express their thinking, many are “called into relationship with others to promote human and ecological flourishing.” The faculty in the Department of Psychology have long recognized this resonance. For instance, several years ago, with Wild Hope Project involvement, we embedded the high impact practice of requiring experiential learning in our curriculum (PSYC495: Internship, PSYC496: Research practicum, PSYC497: Teaching Apprenticeship). Each explicitly requires students to engage in vocational reflection as they apply what they have learned in the major to the work they are doing as part of these classes.

Despite our ongoing efforts, a classic struggle for psychology majors remains, namely, coping with the rampant misunderstanding and mischaracterization of our discipline – by others in the academy, by the popular press, and by the population at large. As a result, students who come to psychology because they are intensely curious about human behavior, but who are not specifically interested in becoming a therapist, find that they are uncertain how to respond when questioned about what they plan do with a degree in psychology. As with many academic majors, the means by which students can apply their learning in ways that foster their vocational development and contribute to the flourishing of their communities are varied and numerous. But too often psychology majors are described pejoratively as wanting to “help people” without acknowledgement of the careful, deep reflection, the professional training, and the breadth of methods by which that helping is achieved. 

Hence, our request for funding. Interactions with alumni are important for our students in many obvious ways, but perhaps less obvious is the value of learning about others’ paths to defining “helping” for themselves. Hearing others who have successfully identified meaning and purpose while pursuing a range of career paths is a highly valuable experience for our current students. To be sure, some invited alumni panelists will likely have followed a more traditional path as therapists. However, it is our intention to invite alumni whose vocations are glowingly obvious even though their post-grad training is not in therapy. Our current students will benefit tremendously from learning how these alumni applied their knowledge and skills acquired while at PLU to their post-graduation vocational journeys. 

Four alumni will be identified whose discernment of their own vocations manifested in a variety of career paths (e.g., medicine, education, law, research/data science, or business), and who are willing and able to share their vocational journeys with current PLU psychology students. As noted above, it is important for our students to hear concrete examples of vocational discernment that represents the breadth of our discipline and the post-graduation experiences it supports. As part of a hosted panel, alumni will be invited to share their stories, with a focus on how their PLU experiences enabled them to identify meaningful career paths that give their lives purpose. We will leave ample time for questions from and conversation with members of the audience. We intend the audience to be mostly comprised of current psychology students, and will schedule the event accordingly relative to the psychology class schedule.

Proposal type: Vocation Celebration

True to the Wild Hope Center’s mission, this project reframes academic advising not as a simple checklist, but as a crucial part of a student’s vocational journey. Vocation is a calling “into relationship with others to promote human and ecological flourishing,” and this celebration is designed to help students in the Natural Sciences see their academic work in this context. By intentionally cultivating relationships between students, faculty, and alumni, we will provide a space for students to explore how their passion for science and math can be a vehicle for service, justice, and care for the world. Our activities will prompt students to ask bigger questions: “How can my knowledge serve my community?” and “What is my purpose within my chosen field?” This week-long event will animate learning by connecting it directly to the formational questions of calling and purpose, helping students build a foundation for a life of meaning, not just a career. By focusing on storytelling, mentorship, and community, we will demonstrate that an education in the Natural Sciences is a powerful calling to address pressing human and ecological needs, fully aligning with the university’s mission. 

We propose to evolve the traditional week-long “Rieke Weekie” into a celebration that aligns with PLU’s Advising Weeks. A lead faculty or staff member will oversee the project, supported by a team of student leaders from across the College who will partner with faculty to plan and execute the week’s events. Both the faculty or staff member and the student leaders will be compensated for their work. This provides students with valuable leadership experience while ensuring the programming is relevant and engaging for their peers. 

The week’s events will build toward a single, culminating celebration featuring alumni. On Monday through Thursday, departments, partnering with the student leaders mentioned above, will host their own advising sessions and activities designed to prepare students to engage meaningfully with alumni. Student leaders will also create a new digital library of alumni stories, including pre-recorded “Day in the Life” videos and written profiles, which will allow all students to engage asynchronously throughout the week and beyond, regardless of their schedule. The College will also continue to host Rieke Weekie events, uplifting a vocational focus. The week will culminate in the college-wide “Frieke Friday” Advising & Vocation Celebration. This single event will be the primary opportunity for students to connect with alumni. At the Friday celebration, student leaders will act as hosts for the alumni from their respective departments. The event will feature free food and refreshments, music, and a welcoming space for informal conversation between students, faculty, and alumni, fostering a strong sense of community and shared purpose.