In short: A tiny welcome kit for learners that start a master should:

• show that the teaching team cares (hand-written welcome note)

• give them tools to get started in their craft (sticky notes, sharpies, etc)

• give them tools to handle the mental pressure (gratitude journal) and work pressure (physical daily planner)

A bit of context

This year (2025) I get to onboard Service Design students in the master program of the HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts for the second time. Here are my ideas to create a good onboarding or welcome kit for the learners.

The categories for the welcome kit

Here are the four categories that I'd love to be present in the welcome, onboarding kit:

1. Emotional signs: something that shows we are happy to have the student there and that we care about them.

2. Practical tools: base tools to help them do the work

3. Mental health tools: tools that help them take care of their mental health, as a Master's can be a pretty challenging time of transformation.

4. Productivity tools: tools that help them set the priority of the day and not get overwhelmed with all the tasks, assignments and deadlines.

What are these tools?

I'm still in the prototyping and ideation phase but here roughly what I think would make a good kit:

1. Hand written welcome card: That just gives a smile

2. Chocolate: We're in Switzerland, every moment is a good excuse to eat some nice Swiss chocolate.

3. Sticky notes + Sharpies: It's just good to have some post-it that really stick and pens that really make it easy to do sketches (2 sharpies of different size and one of color)

4. Thesis dashboard: a tool or template to help them have an overview of all what they researched, ideate, prototyped and learn about their master research and design thesis.

5. Thesis Topic Canvas: a tool to narrow down and imagine multiple versions of a topic for a master thesis that is well scoped.

6. Gratitude journal: a digital or physical journal or tool that helps them to see the progress they make.

7. Physical daily / productivity planner: this one has to be physical I think, to offer a way to the learners to handle the moments when they'll be overwhelmed.

These are some of the early ideas, we'll see what makes it in the kit for the academic year 2025/2026 and how that evolves in the coming years.