Building and Sustaining Resilience

College is a thrilling time in students’ lives, and it also brings unique challenges. It requires you to adapt to new educational settings, peers, and professors. You are expected to be independent, to create your schedule, and to manage your responsibilities in ways that may not have been required previously. There is pressure to make decisions about majors, courses, and careers, all while balancing commitments outside of school. If you are a recent high school graduate, you may notice that teachers and parents no longer check up on you to remind you to stay on task. All of these changes can make the transition to college a bumpy one.

This complicated transition can make the first semester of college feel frightening and lonely, and the obstacles may be overwhelming at times. This is why resilience is so critical for college students. At a basic level, resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult life situations. Every human has some degree of resilience, and that may vary across contexts. For example, one student may be highly resilient on the basketball court, quickly recovering from a missed play or a grueling loss, but that same student may struggle to maintain resilience in a pre-calculus course. In college, resilience enables you to succeed academically and progress toward your goals amid all the challenges.

How can you build more resilience and sustain it throughout college? The following six chapters will guide you through beginning that process.

• 1: Embracing the Successes of Learning – and the Challenges and Failures
• 2: Facing Your Fears
• 3: Committing to Goals
• 4: Developing a Back-up Plan
• 5: Building a Support System
• 6: Asking Questions

Each chapter contains exercises to help you reflect on your resilience and consider ways to build and sustain it.