When educational experiences and activities are designed around each student's individual needs and interests, students learn more.

Through the Forge Your Own Path strategy, an evolution of Pitt’s Personalized Education Initiative, the University aims to prepare students for lives of impact through educational experiences tailored to the specific goals and needs of each student.

Forge Your Own Path

The University of Pittsburgh aspires to integrate the rich expertise and network of the Pitt community with new and emerging technologies to provide customized, meaningful collaborations, connections, and experiences that will prepare and empower our students to lead lives of self-determined impact.

This vision rests on the integration and interdependency of four core components:

People

At the core of our approach is our people. A central tenet of providing a unique, multi-faceted experience for our students requires us to fully leverage the expertise, wisdom, and dedication of Pitt’s faculty, staff, alumni network, as well as the vibrant myriad of partners across the city of Pittsburgh. The vision of tailoring the educational experience at Pitt is premised on availing this human network for all students, so they may discover and forge a path that uniquely suits their individual needs and aspirations.

Tools

Innovative tools provide the support, navigation and interconnectivity needed to bring Pitt’s ecosystem of experts and mentors to scale, providing the critical means to ensure that every student can discover, bridge, and pioneer their own path seamlessly. A suite of programs, platforms, and applications designed to foster mentoring, advising, creative discovery, interdisciplinary collaboration, and meaningful engagement will provide students new ways to navigate the wealth of curricular and extracurricular opportunities available.

Information

Data and information is gathered, analyzed, and used purposefully and ethically to inform and enhance the power and efficiency of our engagement, provide crucial cues regarding outcomes and success, and yield critical insights about how we can optimize and leverage the experiences that shape students in transformative ways.  

Infrastructure

Pitt students are intellectually curious – they often pursue multiple majors and minors, or multiple degree combinations that make sense for them. We are working to help students facilitate their pursuits and expand opportunities to include both in-class and outside-of-class experiences. The Office of the Provost is investing in infrastructure to support these efforts, such as policies, staffing, grant funding, technological solutions, ongoing trainings, and special events, to support our students’ efforts to forge their own paths.

Learn about the opportunity—developing the people, the technologies, and the systems that will allow students to access the resources needed to build the foundation for a successful, meaningful, engaged life.

Welcome to the next great adventure in education, designed specifically for you.