For Any Product to be Successful, Empathy Is Key * Jon Kolko
November 20, 2014
Meet Mary, a college student I met at a Texas state school. She’s a Junior, and she’s changed her major three times. She picked her first major because her mom told her to. She picked her most recent course of study because her best friend is doing it, too. Mary wants to travel the world when she graduates. She’s very aware of the amount her education is costing her family. She loves college, but she’s anxious about her future. She’s anxious about decisions. She’s anxious about everything.
Now imagine you’re designing a product to try to help Mary ease her anxieties. Based on this fairly typical profile of a college student, you can start to
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And that means we need to spend quality time with students and teachers. We’ve been in their dorm rooms, watched them watch TV, and learned about their anxiety around school. We’ve learned about how adjunct teachers juggle classes at four different schools yet know every student by name, and we’ve heard about how teachers fear punitive recourse as a result of discussing their distrust of their administration. These are experiential facts – that’s knowing. But more importantly, we’ve started to feel what it’s like to be a part of the college experience. The knowing helps us convince ourselves and our stakeholders that our products are financially sound, our strategy is rational, and our tactics will succeed. But the feeling drives every single product decision we’re making.
Empathy is the secret. And the catch-22 is that you can’t actually ever feel exactly what Mary feels, or the millions of other Marys, because Mary’s journey is her own. It’s based on the richness of her entire life experience, the baggage of her childhood, the norms instilled in her by her family, the town she grew up in. You might be able to know what Mary knows, but to really feel what she feels, you would have to become her – which, of course, you can’t do.
And so complete empathy is impossible, but the pursuit of empathy is not, and it’s this pursuit that can be methodically taught and learned. Empathy is a spectrum, with you on one side and Mary on the other. The closer you get to
Riley (2017 pg 8) continues to say that, empathy is a dangerous notion if it’s thought to be a mindless, experimental, existential connectedness….whereas some patient encounter may require empathy; some will just be theory or experience. Contextualising empathy is therefore is difficult.
As Mary’s story unravels, she continues to suffer long hours of work, starvation, and separation from her family. She reads her holy bible and is constantly reminding herself that God is with her and will see her through these trials. Her spirits are lifted her master agrees to sell Mary to her husband, and her mistress begins the journey with her, but before long the mistress decides not to go any further and they turn back. Not long after, she starts to loose hope that she will ever be reunited with her family. She becomes discouraged, and her spirit
To many high school students, college seems like a far away land, a mysterious place where everyone wants to be yet not many know how to get there. As children, our parents tell us how much time we have to think about college, and that it is too far down the line to think about. The truth is it is never too early to think about your future. I, like many people, put little thought into my future career and now am lost in an unfortunate mix of indecision and anxiety. Not knowing where you want to be in the future is a hard burden to bear. Many of us tend to find out that we only know what we do not want, not what we actually do want. Do we want to be poor? Absolutely not. Do we want a boring job? Of course we don’t. We all want our
College is an opportunity to truly discover who you are. Often enough, you hear people saying “You should really major in this field, I think you would really enjoy this career.” or, “Do you think you really want to study that? Have you thought about what you will be doing ten years from now?” filling your mind with self doubt, uncertainty, and the anxiousness of not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life. Mark Edmundson wrote an article titled, Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?, published in Oxford American addressing college students and their families how the most important thing college students should focus on is personal growth. When students take their courses seriously their engagement can help finding out who they really are and which future career will lead not necessarily to great financial success, but to a career and life that is very satisfying. Edmundson wants to inspire his audience and have them take what he is saying seriously. Edmundson uses satirical informal language and hypothetical situations to effectively persuade college students to focus on their personal growth in order to create a life and career that is deeply fulfilling.
Nine years ago, I never could have imagined I’d be writing this essay. I was a senior in high school, and, like the rest of my classmates, I was apprehensive about the future. Unlike my classmates, I felt like I had missed the proverbial “you need to get your life together” message. I watched my classmates apply to colleges, their majors already decided and their future careers mapped out. While I was an above average student, I felt I lacked the decisiveness my classmates seemed to have. I did not feel passionate about a career or even a field of study. I felt defective. This was compounded by the financial strain I knew attending college would have on my family. It seemed wasteful to try to “find my passion” at school while squandering
She recalls the struggles, the fun, her failures and even her success in the end (Harding, 2011). The personal story shows the real road it takes with decisions we make “when entering college, Harding wrote that she began college because she felt it was expected of her”(Harding, 2011). College students often make choices based on what they perceive as pressure to do so by others like councilors, parents and even society. They enter college thinking this is what my plan should look like and not making choices that are the best for them. Harding said that in the end “ we all become graduates of one of the finest universities in the world- and already, nobody much cared how we got there”(Harding,2011). To me this shows that even if you pass by the skin of your teeth, you can still fail in the end. A diploma is not the end result that maters the most. Students need to choose colleges that appeal to their needs and goals and not just go to get a diploma. If students spend no time studying weather boarded or not liking their studies, then what difference does the diploma make in the end. Students would just have a degree that often goes unused in life but the costs is ever mounting to these students. The financial cost, the cost of failure, loss of energy and time, causes many students to never finish their education or even to avoid going in the
The transition from high school to college is a dynamic time in one’s life that parallels the change from childhood to adulthood. Both of these changes are dramatic and, as a result, feelings are difficult to put down into words. A messy combination of emotions fills the heart, surfacing in strange ways. Confident high school seniors go right back to the bottom of the chain when entering college as freshmen. These students start all over, just like entering grade school or high school for the first time. The move up from high school to college signals the switch from dependence to self-sufficiency. From a personal point of view, going through the experience of graduating high school and transferring to a residential college campus at STLCOP, made me realize I was no longer a kid and capable of making my own decisions.
Making the jump from high school to college involves a deal of decision making that we, as teenagers, come face to face with. One of the biggest decisions we have is to choose a major and career. The novel, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, starts out similar to how our college careers are about to begin. We’re thrust into the next chapter of our lives, making choices and hoping they’re the correct ones and that we’re making them for the right reasons. Although, we are bound to doubt ourselves and these decisions.
As adolescents begin their senior year, the topic of college often runs without hindrance, often causing extreme stress. As the monetary value, as well as the time spent, begins to accumulate in their minds, students often find themselves bound at the wrists figuring out a way to balance as well as afford college living. In many cases, the upcoming graduates are unsure about their career path, almost enhancing their stress in choosing a school that would cater to their needs. It is almost then they begin to ponder whether or not University/college life is for them, which is could be an extremely advantageous shot in a, for example, high achieving family. Whilst college does allow for a plethora of doors to be opened, the lack of time, effort, and money can hinder one 's ability to properly choose a university. Though school can help with the stepping stones of life, they do not entirely ensure a proper future, therefore many may opt out of school; however, with the correct actions, they may turn out extremely successful, which may not have even happened without the release of the burden of school.
Mary is also struggling against a feeling of displacement. It’s ironic that the two things she places most importance on are the two things she doesn’t posses. Her parents ignore her up until their deaths and she has no friends due to a bitter
Dana Soltysiak, 23, has attended Northampton Community College since 2010. Uncertain of the field she wanted to pursue, but with an ongoing passion for helping others, Dana entered only with intentions on taking her general education courses until she could figure out her specific major. Twelve credits into her freshman year, with only two months left of her second semester, Dana chose to drop out. With her major still undecided, and the thought that maybe she was not as ready for this milestone as she had originally thought, Dana insisted on trying to reason with herself and those around her. Considering
Mary has had so many bad things happen in her early life, yet she tells her stories of loss and abuse so casually.
Today, we are all here to complete the same goal of earning a college education. Here we adapt to learn to trust administration, our professors, and our peers to learn the communication skills and critical thinking skills necessary to become successful business people in the real world.
The following quote from Greer’s story illustrates how Mary might be feeling when she comes home and accepts that the man she loved is gone and her son does not care for her “We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation…” (Text 3, L. 2-3). In the end Mary has nothing left in life, the family dynamic is officially broken and nobody is there to keep the family together, this is what Mary
For many, after graduating high school the next big step is college. I never asked myself why or if I even wanted to. Yet, since I was not yet ready to join the work force, and didn’t want to disappoint my parents, I simply followed the path that I was supposed to take. For a while I had no direction, but through the loss of my high school English teacher and my dream of making my family proud, I discovered that college was the place I wanted and needed to be.