Only 27 percent of graduates from four-year colleges work in jobs directly related to their college majors, according to a 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Whether you’re in college or have graduated, it can be hard to really know what career path you want to pursue, or where exactly you’re going in life.

The Designing Your Life Workshop will teach students how to design a life and career they will love using design-centered thinking. In the beginning, the workshop was inspired by a visit by three deans from NC State to Stanford University’s design school where they explored the concept of design thinking. The workshop is also based on the book “Designing Your Life,” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Originally geared towards upperclassman, the next workshop led by Leigh Shamblin, executive education program director and Poole College professor of practice, will be open to all students.

The workshop will give students the tools to create the life they want and discover what they truly want to do in a career.

“We do an exercise where they’re looking at, ‘okay, what am I on track to do, what kind of career am I planning for right now’,” Shamblin said. “Second would be, ‘if that career went away, if suddenly I could not do that, that just doesn’t exist in the world, what would I do, what’s my backup plan.’ Then third, ‘if I didn’t have to worry about money at all but had to work, what would I do just cause I really love it. Usually you’re not going to move from ‘what am I planning’ to ‘what would I do just cause I really love it’ in one single step, but the idea is to begin to build towards things that encompass all three things — what you’re planning for, what you’re good at and what your backup would be, and what you really love.”

The workshop helps students put together an action plan to try out different things that they think they might enjoy doing in low stakes, quick way according to Shamblin. In design, it’s typically good to prototype, test and get information back very quickly.

“We’re doing the same thing in Designing Your Life — helping you figure out ‘what does it like look like for me to go out, prototype, test, and get information back quickly about whether I like that or not,’” Shamblin said.

The principles of design thinking are empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. These same principles are applied to help students design their future lives to be meaningful and fulfilling.

“This is design thinking applied to your life and the principles are the same,” Shamblin said. “We empathize, we make sure what the real problem is, and then we ideate, and then we prototype and then we test. Empathy is really understanding what do you want out of your life, what makes you feel good, what makes you go, ‘oh god, I don’t want to do that.’ What do you shy away from? Then we’re looking at what the problem is, what do you want to do with your life? Then we begin to ideate using your experience and figuring out what might then we want to prototype with informational interviews and experiences and how are we gonna get feedback to help us figure out if that’s that right direction or not.”

Design thinking incorporates failure as a necessity, according to Shamblin. If you try something and you don’t like it, it’s not failure, it’s learning. Not liking something gives out just as much information as liking something. Sometimes people do find out what career they want early through valuable hands-on experience.

“I was working for a year between high school and college and I got a taste of what I was, what my path would have been,” said Anna Rzewnicki, the director of communications at Poole College of Management. I was heavily influenced by where I was working and walked that path. I was lucky.”

A Venn diagram consisting of the ideas of feasibility, desirability and viability can also help students plan a life and career that is fulfilling.

“Human-centered design starts here with, ‘what do people want?’ In this case, we’re assuming people want to have a life that’s meaningful and impactful for them,” Shamblin said. “Design thinking starts with desirability. Let’s look at what people want, what are the enduring customer needs, what do they really need, because if we design to that, we can figure out feasibility. We can figure out how to make it and we can figure out how to resource it. The intersection of those, those things work and that’s what we’re after.”

Desirability, feasibility and viability also apply to life and the intersection of these concepts create a life that likely works for a person.

“That’s how you take a journey, one step at a time,” Shamblin said. “So many people are on this journey but this is your life and you have to live it. You’re the one that has to live it, so it might as well be something that has meaning for you.”

The workshop is on Tuesday from 6 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. in 2405 Nelson Hall. Students can register through the Poole College website, https://poole.ncsu.edu/event/designing-your-life-workshop/.