How Bryan College helps at-risk first-year students rewrite their story

How Bryan College approaches first-year students

Bryan College is a faith-based institution that approaches student development with a wider lens than retention metrics alone. The student development team, led by AVP for Student Life and Success Alex Staup, focuses on helping students grow into the kind of person who can do meaningful work and contribute well wherever they land. That work happens alongside academic progress, well-being, and engagement.

That framing carries particular weight in the Christian higher education context Bryan operates in. Students arrive on campus with particular callings and ways of engaging the world. Helping each one understand how they’re uniquely wired is part of the work of stewardship the college takes seriously.

Why MCode For Students fits at Bryan

Bryan has used several assessment tools over the years, including personality inventories and strengths-based instruments. Each one offers value, but what drew the team to MCode For Students was its story-based methodology. Rather than asking students to respond to a series of abstract statements, MCode For Students invites them to reflect on real moments from their own lives, times they felt energized, engaged, and at their best. The data emerges from those stories rather than a trait checklist.

That distinction matters in practice. With story-based assessment, students aren’t just completing a survey. They’re beginning to narrate themselves. That kind of reflective self-narration is, in the team’s experience, one of the most underused capacities they can develop in a first-year student.

MCode For Students measures motivations rather than personality. One phrase that frequently surfaces in conversations with students at Bryan is, “This is not who you are, but what drives you.” That framing helps students who have internalized a story that something is wrong with them. Motivational self-awareness gives them a way out of that story.

Inside Bryan’s Foundations of Student Success course

Later that year, Anderson ran MCode For Students again, this time with two sections of incoming Bryan integrates MCode For Students into the Foundations of Student Success course, which runs for the first five to six weeks of the semester and serves students who, by traditional metrics, are most at risk of not finishing their first year. The goal of the course is to acclimate students to the college environment and help them reflect on the kind of student and the kind of person they want to be.

Completing the assessment and reflecting on the results is a graded component of the course. The team grades it so students take it seriously and recognize that this kind of self-reflection is worth their time. In their final paper, students engage with what they found, focusing on how understanding their Motivations can contribute to their broader success.

The assessment doesn’t stand alone in the course. It sits inside a broader developmental process that includes advising conversations, class discussion, and written reflection, with intentional collaboration between the course team and Bryan’s Calling and Career services to integrate the work across student support.

What changes when students learn what drives them

The most common shift the team sees is in students who arrive assuming something is wrong with them. Once they have language for what drives them, they begin to reframe how they think about themselves. A student struggling to focus in one-on-one tutoring sessions realizes he’s deeply relational and does his best thinking in a study group. As students grow in that self-knowledge, the frustration about not fitting in fades. They start to consider the conditions that help them engage well and how to set those conditions up for themselves.

One student described the shift in his own words. “Even if students have what it takes to succeed in something, if they’re negatively motivated, they will struggle to succeed. Now that I know my key motivations, I know the path that I need to take to be successful.”

MCode For Students beyond the classroom

The reach of motivational assessment at Bryan extends past the first-year course. Calling and Career uses motivational data as a starting point in one-on-one coaching, helping students consider where they engage best and how they might connect more deeply with their sense of purpose. That entry point shifts career conversations away from a deficits framework and toward what students already do well.

The work has also reshaped how Bryan’s staff team operates. As the team gained a greater appreciation for motivational differences, they became less likely to read those differences as deficiencies. Tasks that drained one team member often energized another. Understanding those patterns lets the team collaborate more intentionally and steward each other’s gifts more carefully.

What’s next at Bryan

Bryan’s student development team continues to build motivational self-awareness into its work with first-year students. The approach gives students language for who they are at their best and a way out of the story that something is fundamentally wrong with them. That work matters in any context, and it matters especially in the faith-based context where Bryan operates, where every student is an image bearer with purpose, meaning, and potential to contribute.