Last post we discussed the importance of creating a personal success framework after you leave home. The idea of this framework is that it can serve as a structure to help you transition from being a child of your parents to being a grown adult with your own internal value and support structure. This post, we’ll explore some options for creating a personal support system to hold you accountable for the values and organizations to which you aspire.
Although this project is really meant for everyone who eventually leaves their parents’ house, here I am focusing specifically on students attending university for the first time. Over your first semester or first two quarters of university, you may wish to take some or all of these steps to create the system you need to weather the stress of university and to grow into the adult you want to become. By creating your support system, you can reduce the risk of having to experience one of the situations associated with the negative statements above and increase the likelihood of having a positive, constructive college experience.
Personal Resources
- Professional counseling
- First, find the right counselor. When you first get to college, and hopefully before you need it, make an appointment with a licensed counselor at your school’s health or counseling center. Most schools have these resources and make them available for free or a low cost to students. Make an appointment and discuss your goals or whatever is on your mind. While there, figure out if you feel comfortable with this counselor and would find them helpful to navigate a difficult time in your life. If not, schedule another appointment at a later date with a different counselor until you find one you can get along with.
- Stay in touch with that counselor. Try to schedule an appointment with the counselor at least once a semester or quarter. That way you can maintain your relationship with them and they can get a baseline idea of your personality.
- Reach out to the counselor during any crisis situation. Make an appointment with the counselor as soon as you safely can after experiencing any type of crisis (social, medical, emotional) to debrief and figure out if there are any more steps you may wish to take for your own benefit or recovery.
- Friend group
- Make friends across a variety of common interests, values, or activities. This will usually happen organically for students in college, so if it doesn’t happen for you in a reasonable time period, consider discussing that with a counselor.
- Make sure you have at least one friend in each friend group who you are comfortable discussing difficult personal topics with. If you don’t have a friend of that closeness in one of your groups, consider whether you want to remain in that activity or group.
- Consider joining or creating a peer support group, either through an established program in your college or as part of a spiritual or religious group or as an informal group of people working towards a shared group goal or tackling a common personal goal.
- Your community of origin
- Find an older university student who also attended your high school and meet with them at least once during your freshman year to get their take on how the culture of your high school and college differ
- Stay in regular contact with a role model, teacher, coach, or other positive influence from your home community, at least until you have developed a robust social support network at your university.
- Intentionally set video chat or phone dates to stay in contact with your closest high school friends while away at university so that the friendships don’t settle into a texting-only dynamic.
- Your self
- Writing is a good way to make use of your own internal resources and to create resources for yourself in the event of a crisis. You may wish to keep a private journal (online or pen-and-ink) or a blog that is public or accessible to certain people or groups
- Using a journal you can write about current events, your own life and feelings, and how you solve problems that come up for you
- It is also a good idea to document problem events or incidents that occur in your life, whether you choose to do anything else about them or not (any stalking, harassment, discrimination, or bullying by other students, faculty, or others)
- If you later realize that you have become disconnected from yourself, unduly influenced by peers or groups with values that are incompatible to yours, or if you need to recover your sense of self after a traumatic event, rereading your previous journal entries may help you. In the best case scenario, you’ll end up with a record of your social activities that can later be enjoyable to look back on and see how you spent your time having fun in college.
Community Resources
- Your new community
- Consider joining a spiritual, religious, or club focused on personal growth
- Be mindful of the size of your major and department – smaller departments can provide a family-like experience but your experience is also much more dependent on the individual personalities of the peers in your department, making it more important for you to seek strong faculty mentorship and support. Larger departments afford more opportunities to build a selective peer network and more variability in the composition of the required classes you must take.
Next post, we’ll list ideas for finding and using the administrative resources available to you at your university. What other ideas do you have for building a personal success framework?
