Leading a Student Design Team: Lessons from the C2C Project

The Courses to Careers (C2C) project is a dual-threaded, professional development (PD) initiative aimed at fostering meaningful faculty-student partnerships to address ableism in the professional physics field. A key component of this initiative is the student design team - a group of disabled physics students collaborating to support one another, develop workshops, publications, and career PD resources. In this talk, I will explore the impact of leading the design team, highlighting challenges, successes, and lessons learned in co-developing materials that bridge accessibility, PD, and education research. Additionally, I will discuss how this collaborative model has influenced broader project outcomes, including workshop design, faculty engagement, and student empowerment. Through this work, we demonstrate the potential for faculty-student partnerships to drive systemic change in physics communities.