About Through The Waters
Helping college students move forward.
Why we’re here
College students don’t always need more information. Sometimes they need a better way to move forward.
Universities offer students a wide range of important resources.
And yet students can still find themselves stuck between knowing what they need to do and actually doing it.
They may be trying to start an assignment, stay focused, follow through on a plan, connect with other students, or simply keep moving when college feels like a lot to manage.
We explore practical ways to support students in those everyday moments.
We’re interested in approaches that are:
- both formative and fun
- easy for students to access
- compatible with existing campus services
- informed by psychology without becoming clinical
- shaped by the students and university partners who actually use them
Our approach
Student success is both academic and human.
College students do not experience academics, well-being, connection, motivation, and daily life as separate realities.
They experience all of it at once, as whole people.
That’s why we approach student support from a holistic perspective.
Our work draws from psychology, higher education, technology, and direct conversations with students and university leaders.
Our core values
What guides how we show up.
Love
We seek to care for people in ways that are tangible and mutual.
Presence
Human presence is transformative. We seek to be present so people are heard, seen, and known.
Learning
We allow our lifelong learning to be multiplied for the benefit of others.
Generosity
We want to steward our time, knowledge, relationships, technology, and other resources in ways that uplift people with dignity and respect.
Margins
We care for people on the margins more than we care about our profit margin.
Our TEAM
Different backgrounds. Shared commitment to helping students succeed.
Dr. Jackie Parke
Co-Founder
Dr. Parke is a psychologist and former university professor whose work has focused on adolescents, college students, and higher education.
She has spent two decades working directly with young people and has also spent ten years teaching psychology at the university level.
During the pandemic, she began to dream about how to help students in a way that was more scalable than traditional approaches.
Dr. Parke leads our work in student success strategy, university partnerships, program development, and psychology-informed design.
Rob Parke
Co-Founder
Rob is an educator and technologist who has taught technology and applied computing at the University of Southern California since 2012.
His work as a professor centers on helping students make meaningful connections between technology, problem-solving, and their own interests.
Rob brings experience in education, software development, and systems design to the tools and infrastructure behind the organization’s programs, including the Study Buddies platform.
He also brings a longstanding commitment to inclusion and access in education and technology.
Abigail
Intern
Abbey is a psychology major at Vanguard University. She loves the beach, going to coffee shops, and reading.
One of her funniest college memories is accidentally saying the wrong term in her nutritional psychology class. She thought probiotics were called postbiotics!
Alexa
Intern
Alexa is a Political Science and International Studies major at UC Irvine. A fun fact about her: she has gone skydiving!
One of her funniest college memories is when a couple of people dressed as Mario characters came into one of her classes.
Kelley
Intern
Kelley is a third-year psychology major at UC Irvine. A fun fact about her: she loves the color pink and is terrified of chinchillas.
Her funniest college memory is dressing up as Mario with her roommates to see the movie at the campus theater, complete with a paper mustache, pinned-up hair, and a giant “M” on her cap. She got a lot of stares but had a lot of fun.
Psychology, education, and technology working together.
We blend several perspectives at once.
Psychology helps us think about behavior, motivation, relationships, and the human side of student success.
Higher education helps us understand the realities of classrooms, campuses, student support systems, and institutional priorities.
Technology gives us additional ways to make programs easier to access, coordinate, and improve.
These combined perspectives help us remain practical and student-centered.
Built with students
Students help lead our organization.
We believe in building with students, not for them.
The very idea of Study Buddies was inspired by students’ expressing what they really wanted (structure, accountability, being seen, and not being alone).
Through our internship, college students are an integral aspect of leadership and co-creation of how we serve students.
- Study Buddies facilitation
- internships
- user testing
- content creation
- communications
- branding and creative work
- research and feedback
- other student-success projects
Our flagship program
Study Buddies is structured peer co-working for college students.
Students bring their own work, spend most of the session working independently alongside peers, and use a simple check-in and check-out structure to create a defined work period.
Study Buddies grew from a simple challenge we kept encountering:
Students can have resources, plans, and good intentions, and still have difficulty with the moment when it is time to sit down and begin.
The program is designed to add a low-barrier layer of peer support alongside the resources a campus already provides.
University partnerships
We start by seeking to understand your campus.
Every university has its own students, culture, priorities, resources, and constraints.
We approach partnerships as a collaborative learning process.
Before recommending anything, we spend time learning what your students are already navigating and what support already exists on your campus.
From there, we adapt Study Buddies and our other programs to complement your team’s work rather than duplicate it.
We ask questions such as:
- What challenges are students experiencing?
- What support already exists?
- Where are students engaging?
- Where are they having difficulty following through?
- What would complement the work your staff already does?
- What would help lighten the load for staff?
- What would be realistic to implement?
Let’s connect for a conversation.
If you work with college students and are curious about Study Buddies or the broader work of Through The Waters, we’d be glad to connect.