About Through The Waters
Helping college students move forward.
Through The Waters is a student-success organization that creates practical, psychology-informed programs, resources, and opportunities for college students.
Create support that makes sense in real college life.
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.
Through The Waters exists to explore practical ways to support students in those everyday moments.
We are interested in approaches that are:
- useful in real life
- easy for students to understand
- 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.
Support should feel connected to the student’s actual day, not to an organizational chart.
College students do not experience academics, well-being, connection, motivation, and daily life as separate systems.
They experience all of it at once.
That is why we think student support works best when it recognizes the broader context of college life.
Our work draws from psychology, higher education, technology, and direct conversations with students and university leaders.
We look for practical approaches that can fit alongside what campuses are already doing rather than creating unnecessary duplication.
Our core values
What guides how we show up.
Love
We believe care for people should be tangible and mutual.
We treat students, partners, and one another as people first, rather than as problems to solve, users to acquire, or outcomes to optimize.
Presence
We believe being present matters.
We want to listen carefully enough that students and university partners feel heard, seen, and understood before we decide what support should look like.
Learning
We believe what we learn should be shared in ways that empower others.
We stay curious, keep learning, invite feedback, and allow what we learn from students and university partners to shape what we build next.
Generosity
We want to steward our time, knowledge, relationships, technology, and other resources in ways that uplift people with dignity and respect.
Generosity should shape both what we create and how we work with others.
Margins
We want our decisions to reflect a genuine concern for people who are too often overlooked.
Financial sustainability matters, but people matter more.
As Through The Waters grows, we want to keep asking whose needs may be easy to miss and how our work can remain accessible, dignifying, and human.
Our founders
Different backgrounds. Shared commitment to helping students succeed.
Dr. Jackie Parke
Co-Founder
Jackie 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.
Those experiences have given her a view of college life from several angles: working directly with students, teaching them, and collaborating with the institutions that support them.
Through The Waters grew in part from a question that continued to surface in her work:
What practical forms of support could help students in the everyday moments when they are trying to keep moving forward?
Jackie leads Through The Waters’ 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.
At Through The Waters, Rob brings experience in education, software development, technology, 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.
Psychology, education, and technology working together.
Through The Waters draws on 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.
None of those perspectives is enough on its own.
The goal is to combine them in ways that remain practical and student-centered.
Our flagship program
Study Buddies is where this work is starting.
Study Buddies is a structured peer co-working program 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 want to understand your campus before prescribing a solution.
Every university has its own students, culture, priorities, resources, and constraints.
We approach partnerships as a collaborative learning process.
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 be realistic to implement?
Our goal is not to arrive with a one-size-fits-all answer.
It is to understand where a program such as Study Buddies might genuinely fit.
Built with students
Students help shape the organization.
College students aren’t only the audience for our work.
They contribute to it.
Students may be involved through:
- Study Buddies facilitation
- internships
- user testing
- content creation
- communications
- branding and creative work
- research and feedback
- other student-success projects
That involvement matters because the people using a program often notice things that the people designing it cannot.
We want students to help shape the work, not only receive it.
Looking ahead
Study Buddies is the beginning, not the whole story.
Through The Waters is building around a broader mission:
helping college students succeed.
Study Buddies is our flagship program and current primary focus.
Over time, the organization may develop additional resources, programs, or opportunities in response to what we continue to learn from students and university partners.
We are intentionally allowing that work to grow from real needs rather than defining the entire roadmap in advance.
Let’s learn more about your students.
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.
A 30-minute conversation about your campus, your students, and whether there may be a fit.