Hi there! My name is Jeff Thibert, and this will be my third time facilitating the LifeDesign class. I promise you this is because I enjoy being a facilitator and not because Prof. Reifenberg is blackmailing me. Why would you even think that?
Anyway: I’ve been involved in higher education pretty much straight through since I started my undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon in 1997. I graduated from there with a degree in cognitive science, then went to the University of South Florida for a master’s in religious studies, and then earned a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in educational policy studies. This had all happened by 2011—also the year I got married to Jen, a veterinarian who finished her DVM at UIUC at the same time as I finished my PhD. We moved to Tucson, Arizona, so she could do an internship, and after a memorable stint folding shirts and pants at Sears, I got a job as a fellowships advisor at the Honors College at the University of Arizona. A fellowships advisor is someone who helps students apply for things like the Rhodes Scholarship, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, and other major national and international postgraduate opportunities. I loved the work, and I was lucky enough to find a job doing the same work at Notre Dame when we were ready to move back to the Midwest in 2013.
Fast forward ten years, and I’m directing the Flatley Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (cuse.nd.edu), I’ve got two kids (Jacob, 7, and Julia, 5), and I’m somehow still married. The main reason I love directing CUSE is that I get to help students discern their sources of fulfillment and then identify and pursue opportunities to start making good on their potential to use those sources to improve the world, whether through research, internships, service learning, activism, or something else. That’s what I get to do as a facilitator for this course, too. I’m looking forward to doing it again.
