In 2013, a group of top-flight colleges including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania formed the Resilience Project to pool ideas and resources around building students’ coping skills, including Baylor’s workshop on cultivating grit and a Harvard group that encourages students to reflect on their beliefs about success and failure. Yale last year launched “Psychology and the Good Life,” a class about how to find happiness, while Bates is focused on helping students discover “purposeful work.” The Princeton Perspective, meanwhile, is a project committed to normalizing failure among certain not-used-to-failure types.
Florida State University is taking a different approach with a new program that aims to tackle not just how students can weather stress, but also how they can deal with trauma. This fall, its 6,000 incoming freshman will be required to take part in the “Student Resilience Project,” an online trauma-resilience initiative developed by the Institute for Family Violence Studies at FSU’s College of Social Work.
Every freshman will learn in a four-to-five minute video about adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, such as emotional, physical or sexual abuse, a mother being treated violently, or household mental illness. The video explains that people attempting to cope with the suffering that results from those experiences can wind up engaging in harmful behaviors, including drug and alcohol use and dysfunctional relationships. Then, through a series of online videos in the style of TED talks, faculty and mental-health providers will offer strategies and testimonials on how students can deal with issues they may encounter in college, from breakups, academic stress, and the pain of losing a parent or grandparent.
FSU’s program is unique from other resilience programs in a few ways. It addresses trauma head-on, and acknowledges that many students will have faced it before they get to school—in the form of sexual abuse, community violence, witnessing domestic violence, or racism. Indeed, many survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland will join FSU this fall.
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