Updated bLUeprint Enhances Student Life Outside the Classroom

First-year students have an updated framework to help them navigate their time at Lehigh.

Just as professors have a syllabus for their classroom, Lehigh students have the opportunity to develop a plan and goals for their learning outside the classroom, said Stefanie Burke, assistant dean and director of First-Year Experience.

That planning process is called bLUeprint, and while it’s been around for 10 years, it has been updated to reflect a new set of values students can reflect on during their day-to-day life at Lehigh.

The program draws upon five foundations to help students draft a bLUeprint about who they are and what they want to get out of their Lehigh experience. It’s a “student life curriculum,” said Burke, explaining that while other colleges conduct curricular work outside of the classroom, Lehigh was the first to engage in this work across departments. By identifying personal values, support systems and goals, students are able to better learn about themselves while also making more intentional decisions about what they do their first year and beyond.

The Division of Student Affairs is incorporating language from the new foundations into more programming and will raise awareness through events and signs around campus highlighting the new foundations.

“We want folks to learn more about themselves, be more intentional, be able to lead a community in a meaningful way and be curious and engaged learners learning outside the classroom,” Burke said. “We hope common language will aid more in what we want to do.”

The decision was made to update the five foundations because the world has changed so much since bLUeprint was first started a decade ago, Burke said.

“If you think about the world, there’s COVID, women’s rights, the war in Ukraine, gun violence and Black Lives Matter,” she said. “All this stuff has happened in the world in the last decade and it was time for an upgrade.”

One of the foundations added since the pandemic is “strategic adaptability,” which asks students to think about how they cope with change, uncertainty and stress.

Lehigh’s leaders want students to recognize the ways in which systems perpetuate inequality, injustice and oppression, and they want students to create positive change in the community, goals Burke thinks will be aided by the new foundations.

Orientation leaders were required to make a bLUeprint with the new foundations during their spring training. Claire Pickering ’25, a California native, drew an airplane on poster board to represent her journey to Lehigh and wrote the five foundations on different parts of the plane.

“It has encouraged me to look holistically at my Lehigh experience and take action on how I want it to be,” she said.

Orientation leader Luke Kaiser ’26 created a drawing of his first-year residence Drinker Hall for his bLUeprint. He says bLUeprint gives students a way to relate to each other, “I think bLUeprints are a good guideline to success for Lehigh students,” he said.

The strategic adaptability foundation encouraged Kaiser to think about his goals when he decided to change majors from management to journalism.

“I think the reason it’s so useful for all students is that everyone has their own journey. Everyone gets to shape their own college experience, and that’s what makes Lehigh such a great university,” Kaiser said. “Lehigh has so many opportunities for students to really make their college experience what they want it to be.”