What Helps Students Get Through a Demanding Program

Carlos Freire and colleagues at the University of A Coruña in Spain surveyed 1,072 university students about three ways of coping with difficulty: looking at the problem in a more useful way, seeking support from other people, and planning how to deal with it. The students fell into four groups, from those who used all three approaches very little to those who used all three a great deal. The more of the three approaches students combined, the more confident they were in their general ability to handle difficult situations (Freire et al., 2020). In Australia, Alexandra Steel and colleagues at Monash University compared 208 pharmacy students who entered the program straight from secondary school with 64 students who joined after an earlier science degree. In interviews, students in both groups named three things in the program that affected how well they held up: the workload, the feedback they received, and support from the people around them (Steel et al., 2024).

Taken together, these findings suggest that holding up in a hard program depends on what the student does and on how the program is run. Both parts are covered below.

Use more than one way of coping.

The three approaches in the study by Freire and colleagues are ordinary things people do after a setback.

• Looking at the problem in a more useful way means asking whether your first conclusion is accurate. A low score on a difficult exam tells you that your preparation for that exam did not work. It does not, by itself, show that you are not capable of the program.
• Seeking support means telling someone what happened and asking for help or advice. That person could be a classmate, an instructor, an advisor, or a friend or family member.
• Planning means working out the specific steps you will take next and when you will take them.

Some students rely mostly on one of these. If you always talk things through with friends when a course gets difficult but never sit down to plan how you will handle it, you are using one approach out of three. The students who combined all three reported the most confidence. The authors concluded that encouraging students to be flexible in how they cope could help.

A setback is information about what to change.

When a result is bad, the conclusion you draw from it affects what you do next. If you conclude that you do not belong in the program, there is little reason to change how you study. If you conclude that the way you prepared did not work, the next step is to find out what to change. Six Stoic Practices for Setbacks in a Healthcare Program covers one way to separate a result from the conclusion you draw from it.

Students named activities that took their minds off stress.

When Steel and colleagues asked both groups of pharmacy students how they preferred to relieve stress, both named activities that took their minds off it, such as exercise, sleep and listening to music. Among the students who entered straight from school, those who said they had support from partners, friends and family had better grades, and those who reported no way of coping did worse. That comparison shows an association and cannot show that the support caused the better grades. It also applied only to that group.

A run or an hour of music after a difficult day is a reasonable way to cope. Steel and colleagues did not test whether breaks help on their own, so treat a break as one approach among several and go back to your plan afterward.

The program shares the responsibility.

Workload, feedback and support are mostly decided by the program. The authors of the Monash study concluded that higher education still needs resilience programs aimed at academic success. Feedback matters here because a grade alone does not tell you what to change. Comments that explain what you got wrong and what to practice give you something to act on.

A study of graduate students in education at Western Michigan University points in the same direction. Moi Mooi Lew and colleagues surveyed 79 students and interviewed 10, all of whom had been in their programs for at least three years. The students described good relationships with their advisors and program coordinators, and said that classmates mattered less to them because they had little contact with each other (Lew et al., 2020).

If the workload, the feedback or the support in your program is the problem, you cannot fix it alone. After an exam you did poorly on, ask your instructor what specifically to change. If you have no regular contact with your advisor, ask for a meeting. When the workload leaves no time to study, raise it with your program director.

Programs may need to do more of this than they once did. Rita Takács and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest surveyed 4,731 first-year university students in Hungary and compared about 4,350 of them in three groups: students who started in 2004, students who started between 2013 and 2018, and students who started in 2019 or 2020. The students who started in 2004 scored higher on measures of self-regulation and resilience than the students who started later. The authors suggested that support during the college years could help students develop these capacities (Takács et al., 2021).

The one thing to do.

Think about the last setback you had in your program and which of the three approaches you used: looking at the problem in a more useful way, asking someone for support, or planning the next steps. Choose the one you used least and use it on your next setback. If you usually talk it through with friends, also write down the next three steps and when you will take each one. If you usually plan alone, tell one person what happened and ask for one specific kind of help, such as feedback on your exam or a meeting with your advisor.

My book Mindset Mastery, Book 3 of The Mastery Series, is about what you believe about your own ability and how those beliefs shape what you do after a setback. It sets out a four-step method for setbacks: catch, check, switch and act. See Mindset Mastery on Amazon.

What this does not show.

The study by Freire and colleagues surveyed students once. It shows that students who used more approaches were more confident. It cannot show whether adding an approach would make a student more confident. The Monash study took place in one pharmacy program in Australia, and the three factors came from interviews with some of the students rather than from measurements. The Western Michigan study was small, included only education graduate students who had stayed in their programs, and did not compare them with students who left. The Hungarian study compared different entering classes and cannot show what caused the difference between them.

Several researchers have proposed that resilience can be learned. These studies are consistent with that idea, but none of them tested whether teaching students to cope differently changes how they do in their programs.