What 41 students told us about where they live

It all started when…

Design Corps is a paid student consultancy at Dartmouth, run under the Dartmouth Design Initiative. Our engagement: study the university’s 17 Living Learning Communities — themed residential houses — and tell senior campus leadership what was and wasn’t working.

I co-led a two-person research subgroup with one other student. In practice that meant I set the timeline, divided the work, chose the methodology, and owned the direction — where the research was actually headed. We reported up through a working group that answers to the SVP for Campus Life.

How we scoped it

We covered 15 of the 17 communities. The research base:

• 23 individual semi-structured student interviews
• one group interview with 10 students
• one focus group with 8 students
• 4 in-person tours of standalone residences
• benchmarking against residential models at 7 peer institutions

41 student voices in total, plus the outside comparison. Enough to see patterns repeat and to tell a real theme from a one-off.

The directive

Partway through, leadership made a call: stop the individual interviews, switch to focus groups.

I agreed with the intent — focus groups would add a kind of signal we didn’t have. But I also knew from experience how hard focus groups are to actually organize on a college campus: scheduling eight students in one room at one time is a project in itself. Stopping our interviews cold, on the promise of focus groups that didn’t exist yet, felt like trading a bird in the hand for one that might never land.

So I asked for and got permission to keep running individual interviews in the meantime — not instead of the focus groups, alongside the wait for them.

Leadership’s focus groups fell through entirely. They never came together. If we’d stopped interviewing when the directive came down, we’d have lost weeks and had a thin research base to show for the whole engagement. Because the work hadn’t actually paused, we still had a solid foundation of real conversations.

What we delivered

Seven recommendations, short- and long-term:

1. A rebuild of the LLC web presence
2. Recurring community rituals
3. Standardized student leadership roles across communities
4. Co-locating residential spaces that currently sit apart
5. Formal partnerships with academic departments
6. A cross-LLC advisory board
7. An annual review process — proposed specifically so that whatever got implemented from this would actually be tracked

We presented to the working group and again at Technigala, Dartmouth’s tech-and-design showcase.

The outcome

As of our final report, none of the seven had been formally piloted. The research didn’t translate into immediate action, and I don’t want to dress that up.

What it did do mattered more than I expected. Leadership told us the findings closely matched concerns they already held but hadn’t seen laid out with evidence behind them — the difference between a hunch and a documented case.

Then it showed up in writing. The Residential Communities Working Group’s official June 2026 report to Dartmouth leadership, circulated campus-wide by the President’s office, names Design Corps’ role in collecting the student-experience data and cites a specific finding from our interviews: that undergraduate advisor support is uneven across communities, so a first-year’s experience depends heavily on where they land. That report feeds into Dartmouth’s roughly $500M residential communities initiative.

The annual review process we proposed exists to close the adoption loop over time.

What this revealed about how I think

Two things.

First, complying with a directive and protecting the work are not always the same move, and when they diverge it’s worth finding the version that does both. I didn’t defy leadership — I did what they asked and kept a safety net running while their plan got a chance to work. When it didn’t, the net mattered.

Second, the job with 41 interviews isn’t collecting them, it’s deciding which signals are real. Co-leading meant I couldn’t just assert my read — I had to make the case for why a theme was a theme and not noise, to my research partner and then to leadership.