Purpose and Meaning
Inspiring personal growth and purpose through intentional reflection
Through the Emory Purpose Project, the university will develop distinctive pathways that guide students in ways to define and build meaningful lives. Emory already has many significant programs, units, and leaders nurturing and promoting reflective practice. Building on this foundation, the Purpose Project—embedded in the Center for Ethics—will provide spaces, experiences, programs, and courses that encourage reflection on questions of ethics, purpose, and meaning and contribute to students' personal growth.
New Definitions of Success
“Reflection is important to make sense of the world and keep yourself in check. Sometimes you have to recalibrate yourself.”
—Cody Nelson 22Ox 24C, who completed a milestone portfolio reflecting on his two years at Oxford College and how he “found a pathway that worked with my values and goals.”
“A person’s purpose is their self-defined, long-term intention to achieve something that is both meaningful to them and consequential for their world. It guides decisions, influences behavior, shapes goals and provides a sense of direction and meaning. While our intentions and paths may change over time, the pursuit of what matters to us will not.”
—Ira Bedzow, Executive Director, Emory Purpose Project
Purpose Project Highlights
Emory Advance Workshop
Aimed at promoting personal growth and increasing self-awareness, Emory Advance is a five-day workshop to launch in 2025 that will guide students through a process to reflect on and question their perceptions and biases, understand how their goals are shaped by cultural narratives, and explore questions of purpose and meaning. By the end of the retreat, students should leave with clarity, a sense of purpose, and a framework for flourishing, ready to make their mark on the world.
Oxford Milestone Project
Oxford College’s new advising and reflection curriculum encourages students to integrate knowledge gained from classroom, co-curricular, and lived experiences into deeper understanding of their purpose and future goals. Throughout their two years at Oxford, students create a cumulative ePortfolio, showing how they see themselves growing into the future with evidence from their college learning.
Holistic Approach in Health 100
With new additions to the curricular modules focused on positive mental health, values, and character strengths, and developing one’s own health vision and goals, the signature Health 100 course seeks to give all Emory College first-year students not only the tools but the motivation to enhance their personal well-being.
Secular Ethics Courses
Emory’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics offers courses that help students make connections between their studies and their broader sense of meaning and purpose in life, based on existing scholarship and scientific research. Enrollment capacity for “Secular Ethics: The Dalai Lama’s Approach” expanded fourfold in the fall of 2022. Additionally, the center routinely offers “Science of Compassion and Human Health” and “Human Health: Empathy, Theater and Social Change.”
