Mason Hedges ’26 knew what he wanted and why, but he still wondered if he should be striving for more. More, in this case, as measured by the money and status associated with paths he chose not to take. A process of deep discernment, informed by a life unlike that of most of his classmates, took Hedges in a less-traveled direction, one he felt certain would lead to personal and professional fulfillment.
He accepted an Orr Fellowship, named for former Indiana governor Bob Orr, which develops aspiring business leaders and entrepreneurs who begin their careers in Indianapolis. The finance major couldn’t shake the feeling that others might perceive his decision not as an affirmative choice but a second-tier necessity.
“A lot of people, I’m sure, they look at my LinkedIn and think, ‘Wow, this guy really fell off,’” he says. Seeing the jobs some of his classmates had lined up stirred the occasional pang of doubt in Hedges himself. “Comparison was definitely, I think, the main thing that I’ve always struggled with, and some envy.”
“Comparison is the thief of joy,” says Libby Fesko ’26, speaking for herself as she recalls the unexpected malaise she felt after her lifelong dream of medical school acceptance came true — with a notch or two less prestige than some of her peers. Always a perfectionist, the neuroscience and behavior major has labored all her life toward an impossible standard. The pursuit of it has often spilled over from maximizing her own potential to assessing her performance in relation to her perceived competition.
As a college freshman, Fesko, a public high school graduate, marveled at what seemed like long ranks of better-prepared students from private “Notre Dame feeder schools,” leaving her feeling “like I was the dumbest person here.” Induction as a junior into the exclusive Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society showed her otherwise, but that validation introduced a different burden: “Now I have to be perfect,” Fesko says, thinking back to how quickly satisfaction transformed into expectation. “Like, they placed me into this category of, ‘you got this high honor.’ Now I have to live up to that.”
Valentina Morillas ’26, another neuroscience major bound for med school after a planned gap year, never lacked confidence. For her, a central challenge throughout college has been relaxing her relentless focus on her goals to make room for relationships and rest and other nourishing aspects of life. After settling for a disappointing summer opportunity last year that could charitably be called Plan C — the first real bruises to her self-assurance — she encountered unexpected joy and gratitude that expanded her definition of happiness.
The three students’ personal accounts tap into experiences among Notre Dame students that are common if seldom divulged among them for fear of revealing the insecurity beneath the veil of invulnerability. In candid moments, many students report feeling alone in their self-doubt as they navigate an ambitious and competitive academic environment. Their achievements and potential have granted them a rarefied place among the ever-smaller percentage of admitted undergraduate applicants, but that seems only to increase the pressure to make good on the promise the University identified in them.
Notre Dame strives to give students a more holistic definition of success that goes beyond the grades, accolades and other coveted spoils that consume so much campus oxygen. It seems to be one of the hardest lessons for them to learn.
Steve Reifenberg ’81, a teaching professor of international development in the Keough School of Global Affairs, has witnessed “the feelings of inadequacy and anxiety, as well as the constant, often corrosive act of comparing themselves to their peers. In these comparisons, many students felt that everyone else had everything figured out, except for them.”
In response he created an experimental course during the COVID-19 disruption to help nurture their well-being. Faculty were invited to develop “unconventional learning experiences” to be offered online during an extended winter break in 2020-21. Reifenberg felt compelled to support student mental health through an academic offering similar to courses at other universities, such as The Science of Well-Being at Yale and Designing Your Life at Stanford. His version has evolved into the popular Life Design: The Art and Science of Human Flourishing, a three-credit Keough course that draws on faith traditions and scientific insights to guide students toward an inner wellspring of “a more joyful, purposeful life.”
Hedges, Fesko and Morillas were among more than two dozen students who enrolled in Life Design in spring 2026. Morillas had been trying to register for two years at the urging of friends who had taken the class, but seats always filled up too fast. The last few months of college turned out to be a perfect time for all three to look inward and forward to find their way into the world with less weight on their shoulders.
For much of his young life, Hedges has been a caregiver to his adoptive mother, Rosalind, who suffered a stroke when he was 10. He wrestled with the implications of moving four hours away for college, but she blessed the decision and became a big Notre Dame fan from afar.
Through the whirlwind of Welcome Weekend, the young man who grew up in poverty with an unwell single mother could not help but notice how much material and emotional support his peers seemed to have. Then his first college assignment earned a D. Several such low marks among his classmates prompted a scolding pep talk from the professor, but the shellshocked Hedges, already questioning his place at Notre Dame, wondered if he could step it up enough to stay.
“It looked great on paper,” he says, “and then all of a sudden, wow, maybe I made the wrong choice.”
Father Joe Corpora, CSC, ’76, ’83M.Div., a neighbor across the corridor in Dillon Hall, insisted otherwise. “You belong here,” Corpora told Hedges, with enough conviction that the struggling student entertained the possibility.
“I guess something in the back of my head thought, ‘OK, maybe he’s right,’” Hedges says. “‘If I believe in God, and he put me here for a reason, let me try and find out that reason.’”
Fesko’s “why” has always been clear to her. But as psychological research she encountered in Life Design would later show her to be a common reaction, med school acceptance did not leave her feeling fulfilled for long, if at all, before she started dwelling on comparisons and the pressures of taking the next step.
One day during the spring semester, she let Reifenberg know she would miss the first part of class as a mental health respite. She showed up late. Afterward the concerned professor asked about her struggles.
Once Fesko described her experience, Reifenberg pointed out fact after impressive fact of her accumulated honors and imminent opportunities. People dream of what she already had done, he said, to say nothing of the promising future laid out before her.
“Him saying, ‘You’re living someone’s dream life,’ was very perspective-changing for me, because thinking back, if I was a junior and I saw a senior doing [what I was doing], I think I would feel the same way,” Fesko says. “It’s so interesting that when you’re in it, you don’t realize that that is what you wanted all along.”
Morillas never questioned her place at Notre Dame, but pursued her goals with blinkered zeal. When a coveted internship didn’t pan out and her score on the med school admissions exam came back below expectations, she realized that the tradeoff for working so hard might have been too high. “I remember sacrificing sleep and not being with my friends,” she says, “and then every time I’d be with my friends, I’d be like, ‘I’m a robot. Why do I not know how to speak to you?’”
Life Design tries to awaken students to the parts of themselves that may have gone dormant amid the grind. Reifenberg asks them to come up with a “motivating question” to help develop a sense of what fulfills them. In the first Life Design class six years ago, the initial question drafts revealed students grappling with inner turmoil.
One asked, “How would I live differently if my life was not so full of dread and worry?” Another wondered, “Why am I so anxious?”
Similar themes emerge each semester. Reifenberg and a group of “facilitators” — typically Notre Dame employees and former “Life Design” students — work with students in small groups to help shape the questions in more specific terms. The course, the professor says, likely could not provide a satisfying answer to broad questions like “why am I so anxious,” but it can help students craft them into more fruitful inquiries.
“Reframing the question for more concrete action — such as, ‘Where and when do I truly feel more comfortable and aligned with who I am, and what steps can I take to experience that more often?’ — opens the door to new possibilities,” Reifenberg says.
Morillas, for example, came up with a question about how to be more present with those around her without forsaking her aspirations. Fesko sought more acceptance of external factors beyond her control. And Hedges landed on what he describes as a “vague” exploration of his own definition of success.
The course introduces techniques and approaches to help students think through their motivating questions: meditation and breathing exercises, gratitude journaling, information about the impact of technology on attention and mental well-being, readings that offer insights from religion and psychological research. Reifenberg expects open-minded experimentation with these practices and ideas, understanding that students will dismiss some and find others more applicable to their lives.
Hedges took heart in a book of Quaker wisdom called Let Your Life Speak, as well as The Book of Joy, a collaboration between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both on Reifenberg’s syllabus. The ideas he encountered fortified him in his postgraduate decision to take the Orr Fellowship and resist the impulse to pursue a cultural definition of success that did not align with his own.
For Fesko, the “rat race” archetype outlined in Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar’s book, Happier, resonated. “You always think, ‘When I get to the next achievement, I’ll finally be happy,’ and it’s never going to be,” she says, because another “next achievement” always appears in the distance.
Teams of six or seven students led by two facilitators provide a platform for discussing the topics of the day, but also for peers to unburden themselves of the weight they carry. Frank conversations, in which the facilitators often share their own doubts about life and career decisions, offer comfort and form a community of struggling strivers.
“That’s really eye-opening, because often they think they’re the only ones. No, this is everybody, even the adults in the room are thinking about this stuff,” says facilitator Jeff Thibert, director of Notre Dame’s Flatley Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement. The course “just normalizes these experiences in a way where you feel like you could talk about them and work through them. And you realize, no, it’s not just you.”
Morillas sums it up this way: “It’s like therapy once a week. Genuinely, that’s what it feels like. We talk to each other, and it’s a space where you could just air out whatever it is you need.” She could not overstate the value, “particularly now, in this time of my life when there was so much uncertainty” about what awaits after graduation.
For students who have stifled such feelings to avoid admitting weaknesses, the revelation of “oh my God, same,” as the kids say, can be freeing in itself.
“I haven’t talked about it much with anyone, really, about feeling the impostor syndrome and just feeling like it’s never enough, no matter what you do,” Fesko says. “This was the first time that I had that experience, and I think it was nice that everyone was in the same boat of, you do have to open up a little bit.”
Reifenberg structures the course around team interactions to emphasize that individual well-being cannot be realized in isolation. The zero-sum outcomes of test scores and job offers can distract students from the deeper joy and purpose to be found in meaningful relationships.
Confiding in a few fellow students and facilitators, as opposed to the whole class, makes “the stakes of sharing feel lower,” Reifenberg says, “and the potential for genuine connection higher.”
Another Life Design hack puts students into even smaller groups, pairing them based on habits they hope to develop to enrich their lives — exercise, sleep, meditation, journaling. Partners hold each other accountable (homework will get done; self-care requires feet to the fire).
“Talking about habits and communicating them to somebody, it brings to the forefront of your mind these things that you care about and want to do,” Morillas says, “and sometimes do a little bit on autopilot.”
She focused on tapping into her creativity after learning origami from a friend and crafted an artistic charcuterie board for friends she hosted for dinner.
Fesko revived an atrophied love of reading for pleasure — Freida McFadden thrillers and a reread of the Hunger Games series were favorites during the past semester. She cultivated a habit of spending at least 20 minutes before sleep with a book of her choosing.
“I find so much joy in it, and I also think it’s such a good relaxation before bed,” she says. “And the past three years, I’ve not read a book for fun until, finally,” — she pauses for a split second. “It almost feels like taking back a little bit of that power.”
The students learned a paradoxical lesson: True success in school and in life depends on carving out space for yourself and your relationships. Not just as a breather from the academic treadmill, but as the basis for thriving in all aspects of your life.
Devastating news drove that home for Hedges. One April morning, weeks before his graduation, he got word that his mother had died at age 79. Friends at Notre Dame rallied around him and “literally all” of them accompanied Hedges to the funeral.
His mother’s life testified to the importance of family and community. She had fostered dozens of children, and the care she gave Hedges could never be repaid, no matter how much she needed in return. That’s a true measure of success as he understood it even before his last semester in college, but reflecting on his mother’s example alongside insights from the course reinforced the feeling in his heart.
“I should let my life speak and pursue what I actually want to do,” Hedges says, sounding more certain now about how to design a flourishing life on his own terms.
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.