SCoRE | What Does Resiliency Training Offer Students?

The case for SCoRE

Hear what researchers, college and university administrators, and LEAD Pittsburgh affiliates have to say about the need for resilience education and SCoRE.

What Does Resiliency Training Offer Students?

Posted on September 9, 2011

Toni Macpherson (bio) explains what SCoRE offers students during college and beyond.

This program provides them with a skill set that either initiates them into resilience or adds to their strength and resilience that will help them throughout the entire course of their lives. Life is filled with many opportunities and many challenges, many situations for growth and also situations for setbacks. How we manage all of that is going to make the difference in terms of how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about our lives, our careers or marriages, our own parenting into the future.

And the other part of resilience training that I think is important is it's also—it's relatively easy to learn—people think it's relatively easy to learn how to handle success, and yet, it also brings with it its own set of challenges. So we hope that all of the students that learn from this are going to be successful and then also have the resiliency skills to learn how to do the next challenge because life is filled with challenges and transitions and opportunities that stretch us. The more resilient we are, the more effective we're going to be in stretching.

These skills will also be things that you take out at different times and challenge. Graduating from college is a challenge. What do you do next? So developing a pattern of behavior and a set of mental exercises and skills that you can bring to bear when you need them is going to be helpful for them for life.

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Excerpted from interview with contributor in May 2011.

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What the experts say

"Even for the brightest, best-adjusted young person the transition from high school to college is a very, very challenging one.… All young people entering college could benefit from focusing on what their strengths are and how to protect themselves in the face of the stresses that will inevitably come with the transition to college life.… The lessons that one learns in developing a kind of resilience outlook are lessons that will serve one for the rest of one's life."

Ellen Frank, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

"This program provides students with a skill set that either initiates them into resilience or adds to their strengths, and resilience will help them throughout the entire course of their lives."

Toni Macpherson, MEd
Executive Director
LEAD Pittsburgh

"If resilience education were incorporated early into college life, it would benefit campuses in many ways, because they would avoid a certain amount of increased individual difficulties with students, and that's wear and tear on the entire college campus.… There is no doubt in my mind that having a set of coping and resilience skills is just as important as whether I get an A or a B in a particular course."

David J. Kupfer, MD
Professor, Department of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

"Learning to be resilient is imperative in life; I don't know how you can go through life as well without it.… I think students will take away fewer scars of failure, rejection, and anxiety because they’ll know how to do things they might not have known had they not taken a course in resilience."

Sheila R. Fine
Chair, Board of Directors, and Principal Founder
LEAD Pittsburgh