How to Build Resilience During College—When it Matters Most
Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
Remember as a kid when you couldn’t score that crucial penalty goal at a football game? Or when your project was not selected for the annual school exhibition? Do you also remember how you coped with each of those times? Whether you sulked in your room for the rest of the week, or put in place a more rigorous training schedule, you inched towards developing coping mechanisms to ride out tough times. Now at college, as you move closer to starting your careers, revisiting some of these experiences from school can bring you a step closer in identifying your ability to be resilient.
Resilience can be understood as one’s ability to cope with adverse situations and bounce back stronger. What begins in your formative years at school as meta-cognitive social and emotional learning after many a missed goals, skinned knees, and broken hearts, eventually determines your fortitude as adults to make your way through sticky spots in life. The familiar comforts of childhood friends, compassionate teachers and principals, and the academically supportive ways of school tend to cushion the fall for your adolescent selves as you build resilience.
College, however, is a whole different beast. In a 2019 study of college students, 75% of current college students said that they need help for emotional or mental health problems.
For many of you, the pandemic has come at a time when you were only beginning to adjust to your newfound freedoms, to find your place amongst thousands of unfamiliar names and faces, and in unfamiliar places, especially if you’re studying away from home. This is enough to put your resilience to test. Add to that the frustration of missed summer internship opportunities, the disappointment of cancelled graduation ceremonies, the inconsistent social support systems — all of which have accelerated what would have ordinarily been a more phased, transformative rite of passage. How can you, during your college years, emerge stronger on the other side of the global lockdown?
Research by Richard Sagor has suggested that students who leave school with certain kinds of positive social and emotional experiences are likely to be more resilient than others, with a positive outlook about their futures. These experiences tend to be:
The ones that proved competence
The ones that demonstrated a sense of belonging to the community
The ones that made them feel useful
The ones that gave them a sense of agency
These experiences are often carefully crafted into students’ daily classroom experiences or present themselves more frequently within a smaller community like a school. At college, however, you may find these harder to come by, which is why you need to take your resilience in your own hands and curate these experiences for yourself. Understanding your own social and emotional needs, and diving into your own behaviors to fulfill the same would help you persist in challenging times.
Here are four suggestions on how to build your resilience.
Foster a feeling of competence. Moving from regulated, time-tabled schedules to having a looser structure around self-study requires a considerably higher degree of self-discipline. No longer will teachers be following up on drafts or assignments due, which often leads to work piling up, and deadlines looming large. You may also feel incompetent if you tried to complete a week’s worth of work in an all-nighter. Creating manageable schedules, with specific, realistic tasks for the day, provides an opportunity for a sense of achievement. Use apps like Trello to work your way backwards from deadlines, and to follow schedules. Ticking things off your list will go a long way in making you feel better about yourself, just like you did when the teacher added a gold star against your name for submitting your homework.
Develop your community. Everyone feels the need to belong. Nurturing meaningful relationships is particularly important to building resilience as you tend to feel more isolated in crises. You could have been a part of the “cool kids” gang at school, or the tree-hugging eco-club geeks. It is just as important to find your tribe in college. This has become harder to do in-person with universities closed, but using social media platforms to organize poetry readings or join an online club of International Relations enthusiasts presents a great opportunity. For those of you studying at universities abroad, you may also want to kick-start a community for others from your own country or cities, who may need the support of someone closer to home.
Feel useful. Being assigned as a mentor to new students or raising funds for disaster relief efforts with the community club — these initiatives of cooperative or service learning would help you feel useful at school. In a situation like today, it is only natural that you are questioning your role and purpose. How can you make sense of the crisis? Where can you contribute? In other words, can you still be useful? There is a lot that needs doing, and you should chip in wherever possible. You could set up videoconferencing sessions for the elderly who are unable to use these technologies to connect with their families. You could volunteer for your school teachers to help them run mobile book drives. Many startups are struggling to maintain full-time staff. You may even like to explore internships with them in areas of your interest. This will help you enhance your existing skill sets while also contributing to building businesses at this hour.
Take back control of the things you can. Life as a college student comes with a lot of choices — you choose your own courses, your roommates, your plans for the future. With all this choice comes a lot of chaos and confusion. All too often, you fall into the trap of anxiety over not doing what you are meant to be doing, which leads to a spiral of inaction which leads to more anxiety. (Anyone else getting flashbacks of preparing for school exams?) Developing agency is pivotal for your decision-making process, and to prevent feeling overwhelmed and “stuck.” It is important, therefore, to take control of things you can control. You can do this by following two simple steps — controlling stimuli and controlling your responses. Be aware of what you let in — Netflix, online games, social media posts. Allow yourself some space and time to declutter your mind and religiously build in “me time” into your day. This could simply be some time for quiet meditation, home workouts, or doodling. Respond to situations or people only after you’ve taken the time to think. And when you need to think, repeat step one.
Above all else, it is important to think of yourself as a learner in this situation — something you did at school and are continuing to do at college. While these are dark times, they have also given you the opportunity to get to know yourself better, to connect with how you experience the world around you. So keep calm, and learn on.