The stress of managing her engineering classes at Northwestern University didn’t just weigh on Fiona Letsinger mentally—it began to take a toll on her academic performance.
In her second year, Letsinger’s dean introduced her to PATH, a peer mentor–led program housed in the engineering school that helps students manage stress, perfectionism and personal growth.
“From the second he described it, my jaw was on the floor,” said Letsinger, a fourth-year civil engineering major. “I was like, ‘Yep—that’s exactly what I need.’”
Launched in 2016, PATH—short for Personal Advancement Through Habits—is an eight-week program that guides students through reflection and personal development using a mix of online coursework and small-group discussions.
During the 2024–25 school year, 88 students completed the program. About 90 percent reported a positive personal change, and more than 60 percent said they experienced growth in self-awareness; roughly half said it improved their motivation and goal-setting skills.
Letsinger said the program gave her the language to recognize and name the ways stress and perfectionism were shaping her college experience.
“I thought I couldn’t be a perfectionist because I wasn’t performing highly enough,” Letsinger said. “It wasn’t until PATH when I was able to get the vocabulary to identify how stress showed up in my life.”
Impact on students: Joe Holtgrieve, assistant dean for undergraduate engineering, said his experience supporting students in both short-term and systemic crises inspired him to start the PATH program nearly 10 years ago.
At the time, Holtgrieve said, Northwestern was reassessing its withdrawal policies and considering making it easier for students to drop courses later in the term. That prompted him to engage in difficult conversations with students about whether withdrawing was the best option—or whether they were experiencing what he calls an MOI, or “moment of intensity.”
“How you respond is going to be really important for your future success and resilience,” said Holtgrieve, who remains a PATH faculty member. He added that students would later reach out to thank him because they performed better academically than they thought they would.
Liz Daly, assistant director of academic advising and PATH faculty, said the program was originally intended for engineering students on academic probation but later expanded to include anyone feeling overwhelmed.
“We had students who would request to take it again because they appreciated the community and the conversations that weren’t happening elsewhere on campus,” Daly said.
That emphasis on reflection and peer support continued among students who participated in PATH during the 2024–25 school year.
To better understand students’ experiences, Holtgrieve and Daly surveyed participants, asking them to reflect on their academic challenges and select three goals from a list of seven. More than half chose “shift mindset to embrace challenges, persist and learn from feedback.”
Participants also completed surveys at the start and end of the program, rating which behaviors they found most challenging.
Before starting PATH, more than half said they “dwelled on inadequacy after failure” and were “avoidant and/or withdrawn when things were going poorly.” By the program’s end, that number had dropped to about 15 percent.
Daly said students often cite Holtgrieve’s “flashlight of attention” lesson as particularly helpful.
“Our attention is like a flashlight … and whatever is illuminated by that light represents our awareness,” Holtgrieve said. “Where we shine that light represents our intention,” he added, noting that students’ intentions are often “yanked back and forth by crises, breaking news or self-critical narratives.”
“If we can tune in to what’s present in the moment through our awareness and decide whether something is helpful or productive, then we can step back, understand the intention behind the attention that’s creating this awareness and adjust it,” he said.
Letsinger agreed with Daly, saying this lesson was a game-changer in how she understood her own thinking.
“I remember hearing that and immediately being like, ‘Yep, I need and want more of that kind of thinking,’” Letsinger said, adding that she not only enrolled in the program again the following quarter but later became a PATH mentor herself.
What’s next: Holtgrieve and Daly said the program became so popular that other institutions have adapted it, including Smith College, which launched its own PATH-inspired program in fall 2020.
Daly noted that in conversations about PATH’s impact, faculty and staff often asked whether they could participate as well. As a result, Holtgrieve and Daly now hold multiple sessions each year for Northwestern employees interested in learning strategies to manage stress in their own lives.
Holtgrieve said that response suggests that many of the conversations happening among students also resonate with faculty and staff.
“It’s an empathetic bridge, and it helps them to recognize that they’re struggling with some of the same things that their students are struggling with,” Holtgrieve said.
Ultimately, Holtgrieve said, PATH is meant to help anyone practice responding to moments of uncertainty instead of trying to make them disappear.
“When you’re feeling or confronting a moment where it’s not clear what to do, it’s human nature to say, ‘I want that to go away,’” Holtgrieve said. “But being able to practice living through and responding to those moments is how you build the skills to be a better person.”
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