Watch an Overview of Purpose Learning

ARTICLE 34

Watch Video of Sarah Stein Greenberg explain "Getting The Call"

Getting “the Call”

Recordings of Stanford Reserve Corps messages

The phone displayed here plays several actual recordings given to students upon receiving the news of their rotation in the Stanford Reserve Corps. The Reserve Corps was created in 2024 to create an experiential and immersive learning experience that challenged students to apply their declared mission in context.

As a secondary goal, the Stanford Reserve Corps existed to provide support to areas of need in collaboration with partner organizations around the world. Stanford was grateful for the longstanding relationships it forged with project partners, and for inculcating a spirit of service, humility and braveness amongst its populi.

As you will hear in the messages, Stanford students relocated to Collectives for one month before traveling to prepare for the journey ahead of them along with their team of peers.

Listen to Stanford Reserve Corps Calls

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At the Farm and Around the World

Evolution of the Stanford campus map and flyover of Impact Lab sites

Stanford’s footprint at home and abroad has shifted continuously throughout history.

Part one of this projection shows the evolution of the campus map from 1902 through select intervals until the advent of undergraduate teaching hubs in 2024. A hallmark of the Axis Flip era, these hubs had a Dean at the center of each. Faculty were co-located at hubs for periods of time to develop and teach new courses.

Part two is a flyover of a handful of global Impact Labs. Students often spent up to a year in an Impact Lab as a way to apply their field of study to challenges they cared about. Sometimes thought of as an academic analogue to the Olympics, Impact Labs attracted the top faculty from Stanford and around the world for in-context research and application.

Watch Video of Carissa Carter explain Impact Labs

Watch History of Campus Maps and Impact Labs

ARTICLE 211

Declare a Mission, Not a Major

Recovered time capsule images

In response to the hunger for the meaning or ‘why’ behind one’s studies, Stanford piloted the “Declare a Mission, not a Major” program in 2017, in which students coupled their area of learning with the purpose that fuels it.

Launched formally in 2021, Purpose Learning prompted the launch of a series of “Impact Labs” around the world in which faculty and students tackled global challenges through immersion.

Iconic Impact Lab examples include the ten-year collaboration between Stanford, MIT and IIT which accomplished its ‘moonshot’ goal of making clean water accessible for every citizen in Southeast Asia.