Most students come to college expecting to learn the technical and theoretical curriculum of their major through coursework. But success in school and the workforce also requires knowledge of a hidden curriculum: how to negotiate with faculty, peers, and supervisors, build support networks, understand and navigate unspoken institutional norms and expectations.
For some students, those lessons arrive early. They grow up seeing parents, siblings, or mentors model how to ask for help, seize opportunities, communicate with authority figures, and move through professional environments with confidence. But for many—particularly first-generation or community college transfer students—the hidden curriculum can feel like a language they never learned, but that their peers somehow already know.
Addressing that disparity is at the heart of the Institute of Diversity Sciences’ (IDS) Negotiation for Career Success program, a new credit-bearing course housed at UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management and open to all UMass students.
Built from years of research, experimentation, and lessons learned through IDS’ online Leadership Academy (2020 – 2024), the program reflects a simple premise: if the hidden curriculum is shaping who gets ahead, a university committed to social justice should be teaching it to students. Negotiation for Career Success is the stronger second chapter of that premise. It takes what worked in the Leadership Academyand refines it into a measurable, scalable, researched-backed model—and one that other universities can follow.
Lemonade Out of Lemons
Like most IDS stories, this one begins with collaboration: a partnership between IDS Director Buju Dasgupta and Hannah Riley Bowles, a leading scholar on negotiation at the Harvard Kennedy School. They met through Rati Thanawala—a longtime advocate for the advancement for women of color in tech—amidst the devastation of COVID-19.
The pandemic wiped out opportunities for internships, networking, and other key early-career milestones. Some students could lean on family connections or resources to soften the blow.
But many others could not, and for them, the missed opportunities were often irreplaceable. Many of these students—often from communities that already struggle with lower retention rates and underrepresentation in higher education—were frantically trying to replace lost internships with other paid work over the summer.
So Buju, Hannah, and Rati came together around a shared question: as the pandemic narrowed pathways from college to career, how could they support the students who needed these pathways the most?
Their answer was the Leadership Academy. Initially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Leadership Academy was a direct response to that widening gap.
“We wanted to make a bad situation better,” Buju recalls. “We had a constellation of people like Hannah and Rati, and resources like the NSF grant, and we made lemonade out of lemons.”
A Promising Premise
The Leadership Academy created cohorts of underrepresented students in computer science and engineering. A fully remote summer program, it offered practical training in the hidden curriculum: how to negotiate, communicate, self-advocate, and navigate the unspoken norms that shape success. It paired students in close-knit support networks with peers and business professionals as mentors. It helped thembuild professional networks, access internships, apprenticeships, and other opportunities.
And it worked. Initial results showed that negotiation was much more relevant to students’ lives than many people might assume. Students weren’t just negotiating about what they needed with their professors or employers, but with their families. Compared to a control group, students who participated in the program reported a broader understanding of what could be negotiated, and greater confidence in their ability to navigate these situations. Students began practicing these skills more actively in their academic, professional, and personal lives.
The Leadership Academy had demonstrated the premise: when people learn how to recognize opportunity, ask for what they need, and approach negotiation with confidence, they are better positioned to stay on track and move forward. Indeed, even as the pandemic wound down and opportunities returned, demand for the program continued to grow.
Lessons Learned from the Leadership Academy
In the middle of the pandemic, the Leadership Academy was a stop-gap measure. The fully remote summer format made sense at the time. But it also had limitations.
Drawing students from colleges and universities across the country for only a brief period, the program was struggling to collect long-term data. The format made it unrealistic to track students over time, measure results in their academic or professional progress, and follow them in a sustained way.
That wasn’t going to cut it for Buju or Hannah. They wanted an intervention that would make a lasting impact—and they wanted to see that impact in data.
“There are trainings and summer programs galore,” Buju remarks.
“Neither of us wanted to just do another one unless we really had evidence it was making a difference,” Hannah adds.
The Leadership Academy also lived outside of the formal academic curriculum, which made it hard to anchor institutionally. As Buju says, “Programs have a longer shelf-life if they are part of the broader curriculum of a university.”
So they had an idea to solve both problems at once: they would bring the program home to UMass Amherst.
Version 2.0: A Thoughtful Redesign
Negotiation for Career Success retains the core ideas and content of the Leadership Academy, but is a credit-bearing, in-person course at the Isenberg School of Management. This new-and-improved “Version 2.0” offers three key advantages over its predecessor.
First, it addresses the Leadership Academy’s limitations. All participating students are consolidated at UMass Amherst, so the program can track their academic progress and follow up over multiple years. This solves the data dilemma and transforms the program into a true research-informed initiative.
And because the program now enjoys institutional backing at the university, it will have the longevity to be repeated, refined, and potentially adapted as a model for other institutions. The students themselves will no longer have to squeeze it around the margins of their education—they can earn academic credit while building the skills and benefit from in-person instruction.
Second, it plugs into progress at the state level. Massachusetts has made community college tuition free. IDS has followed suit: Negotiation for Career Success is available to any junior or senior undergraduate student in any major, with a focus on community college transfers and first-generation, working-class students. As Massachusetts works to broaden access to education, this program will help students transition from transfer to four-year completion.
Third, it thrives from the contributions of the UMass Amherst community. Professor of Leadership Joe LaBianca is the right local faculty partner, who helped place the program in its natural home at Isenberg. Graduate student Joshua Luker teaches the course currently, succeeding Courtney Hart, who taught the course at UMass in the first iteration and is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Texas Arlington.
Hannah continues to co-direct the program through the Negotiate WELL Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Buju does the same through IDS and supervises PhD student Hector Sosa who is leading the research and assessment of the program as well as program manager Casandra Feen, who coordinates implementation and day-to-day operations across partners.
IDS and its partners are preparing for a full launch of Negotiating for Career Success this fall, and plan to offer it every semester thereafter. But they ran a successful pilot last year, and the program’s value is already clear to the students who participated.
A Student’s Perspective
One such student is Marketing Major Sophia Chiodo.
A first-generation transfer student from Mount Wachusett Community College, Sophia arrived at UMass Amherst excited to pursue a bachelor’s in business administration. But she quickly realized that she was also being graded on that hidden curriculum: networking, resume-building, and other traditional markers of readiness in professional life. These things seemed to come naturally to some of Sophia’s peers, but she had no idea she was expected to already know them.
So in her first semester, she struggled.
But in her second semester, she met Buju, who gave her a copy of Change the Wallpaper. Buju’s book helped Sophia understand that the problem was not her. Rather, it was that most school and work environments normatively reward behaviors that only some people are taught, while those who aren’t often get left behind.
Sophia would not be left behind. Buju suggested she sign up for Negotiating for Career Success.
“Going into the course, I thought, ‘Oh I never have to negotiate,’” Sophia says. “But the course made me realize negotiation is all around my life.”
Sophia learned to recognize moments of negotiation that she would not have noticed before. She met successful professionals who modeled skills for her. Through roleplay and guided exercises with students and mentors, she came to understand her own communication tendencies and where they might inadvertently weaken her position.
“Now when I go into the real world and face someone who’s a tough negotiator, I can go in with confidence having played these things out before,” Sophia says. “I built practical skills that will be invaluable as I pursue work in marketing, client relations, and leadership roles in the future.”
Sophia left the program feeling like she now understood the hidden curriculum.
“I believe this class really made a lasting difference in my experience at UMass,” she reflects. “I feel much more confident moving forward in my career, knowing that I have this amazing experience to lean back on.”
Check out Sophia’s inspiring story to learn how she found empowerment—and is bringing it to others through her own student-support and advocacy work on campus.
A Successful and Sustainable Model
During the pandemic, IDS and its partners saw a need to help under-resourced students through the storm. With Negotiation for Career Success, that intervention has matured into a sustainable model embedded at UMass Amherst that can reach more students, generate better evidence, and thrive within the university system. It demonstrates how research and vision can combine to create a long-term course-driven program that addresses a socially meaningful problem and is folded into the university curriculum. We look forward to getting started in the fall!