How Colleges Help Students Find Purpose in Their Work

In a conference room overlooking Alumni Walk, Peter Bysshe picks up a marker, faces a whiteboard, and quickly sketches a grid — 10 boxes across, 10 down. "Now," he instructs the students seated around the center table, "give me words."  After five minutes of free associating, the students have a chart with 100 words that capture their impressions of L.L. Bean, one of several businesses they’ve visited this term as part of an intensive, five-week class that is teaching them how to build, manage, and shift a company’s image. An hour later, a dozen students in another classroom listen to Timothy Kelleher and Sean Cahill describe how they built the nation’s largest "organically grown" Planet Fitness franchise with the help of private funds. Those could be scenes from any business school, but this is Bates, a liberal-arts college, and the men presenting on this Friday in June aren’t professors but alumni.