Friday Focus: Transformative experience

Feb. 24, 2023

— By Alex Hirsch, director, UAF Honors College and Climate Scholars Program

UAF has an energizing new vision statement: “Excellence through transformative experiences.” This is a bold and expansive new vision for America’s Arctic university. It invites us to consider that post-secondary education at Alaska’s research institution is about creating meaningful discoveries, fully embracing our unique and inspiring place, and ultimately enriching lives.

W.E.B. DuBois once wrote that the modern university must strive “not only to train a psychologist or brick mason, but a person, and to make people we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living.” In this sense, I can think of no more laudable an ambition than that reflected in our new vision statement.  Transformative experiences are what a good and interesting life is made of.

But what is a transformative experience? In my own life, I have noticed that I rarely recognize a transformative experience while it is ongoing. It is only looking back afterwards that I can discern a significant and meaningful change has taken place. This is because transformative experiences are threshold occasions -- something new and often unanticipated is brought forth, something vitalizing. An experience that is transformative is one that alters the conditions of possibility for someone who, by virtue of having had the experience, now bears a new capacity to pursue a new source of potentiality.

Examples of transformative experience are replete at UAF. Everyday, minds are changing, opportunities are changing, the odds of student success are changing, and yes, Alaska is changing. To see UAF as a place where transformative experiences happen is to re-frame not only what it is we are doing when we come to work, but also to broaden the scope of what it is that we can do for one another more generally.

Nastasia Caole is a great example. Nastasia is a climate scholar from Sitka studying Arctic governance and Yup’ik at UAF. While working on her occupational endorsement in scientific diving and water survival, she has interned at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center and served as a student employee helping with musk ox at the Large Animal Research Station. One sees Nastasia all over campus bearing a backpack loaded with heavy rocks because she is currently training to hike Denali this summer. Though she started her college career at UAS and UAA, she will be graduating from our campus this spring because of the transformative experiences that have inspired her at UAF. 

“Experience” is a word rich with layered meaning. The conative root of the word stems from the Latin experientia referring to trial, as in, to test, undertake, undergo, or experiment. “Experience” also derives from the Greek antecedent to the Latin empeiria, which serves as the root for the English word “empirical,” emphasizing knowledge derived from active observation. This etymology resonates with the old cliché that one learns best not only from passive memorization, but also from doing.

In Alaska, learning-by-doing comes from worldly engagement, from a sense of deep connection with place, and from a respectful and inclusive relationship with people, past and present. UAF’s new vision statement invites us all to wonder how we can be apart of a transformative experience for someone and how, in so doing, we might ourselves be transformed. I invite you to join me for coffee in the coming weeks to collaborate on your vision for a new transformative experience at UAF.

Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF's leadership team every week. On occasion, a guest writer is invited to contribute a column.