26 Jul The College Transition: What Actually Helps Students Thrive

Every year around this time, families start feeling it—that mix of excitement and low-grade anxiety that comes with a child heading off to college. The question I hear most often isn’t “Will they get good grades?” It’s something more fundamental: Will they be okay?

The good news is that the research on this is genuinely encouraging. Thriving in college isn’t a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a set of learnable skills—and right now, before move-in day, is exactly the right time to talk about them.

It Starts with Resilience (But Not the Way You Think)

Resilience gets thrown around a lot, but here’s what it actually means in the context of the college transition: the ability to bounce back and take on challenges with an “I’ve got this” mentality. Not a guarantee of success every time—just the confidence to attempt things and keep going when they get hard.

The most important thing to understand? Resilient kids are made, not born. It’s a learnable skill set, built over time, that students can continue developing once they’re on their own.

The foundation rests on three things:

• Agency—an internalized “I can do this” belief that enables persistence. This is a growth mindset in action.
• An optimistic belief system—not toxic positivity, but a genuine sense that challenges are survivable. This develops gradually, from small wins accumulated over years.
• Coping skills—and here’s where parents often underestimate their kids. Think of coping skills like a savings account: the more strategies a student has deposited over time, the more they can draw on when things get hard. Deep breathing, time management, music, movement—the specific tool matters less than having a toolkit and knowing when to reach into it.

The key is to find the one or two strategies that actually work for your student—not what works for their sibling or their high school best friend—and practice them consistently. A few minutes a day builds a habit. And the habit becomes portable: something they can use anywhere, anytime, without waiting until stress reaches a crisis point.

The Other Half: Relationships

If resilience is the inner game, relationships are the outer game—and they matter just as much.

Research is unambiguous on this: relationships are the primary driver of student motivation, persistence through difficulty, sense of belonging, and even identity development. Students who build connections are more likely to stay, more likely to seek help when they need it, and more likely to find meaning in their college experience.

The challenge is that most students are comfortable building peer relationships but feel intimidated by adult connections—professors, advisors, staff. This is worth addressing directly, because those adult relationships are often what make the difference when things get hard.

A practical starting point: encourage students to identify one professor during the first week—ideally for a class they’re genuinely excited about—and have one brief conversation before or after class, or during office hours. The goal isn’t a deep connection right away. It’s simply to have a face and a name associated with each other, so that going to office hours later doesn’t feel like walking into a stranger’s house. Over the first month or two, having had even one brief exchange with each professor changes the entire dynamic.

And don’t overlook the people who aren’t faculty. Dining hall staff, custodians, administrative assistants—these are people who will see your student every single day. “Tell me about you” goes a long way. Some of the most meaningful adult relationships students form in college are with people who simply know their name and notice when they seem off.

Making Friends: The Unglamorous Truth

Here’s what the research actually shows about how friendships form in the first weeks of college—and it’s a little anticlimactic, but also reassuring.

Be friendly. That sounds obvious, but it has a concrete implication: put away the headphones. Headphones signal “don’t talk to me.” Making eye contact and saying hi to familiar faces is genuinely the starting point—and it’s something students can do from day one.

Notice propinquity. This is the social science term for what happens when people are around each other repeatedly. The classmate sitting nearby three times a week. The person who keeps showing up at the same dining hall table. These repeated, low-stakes encounters are the soil that friendships grow in. Students don’t have to force deep connections—they just have to keep showing up and saying hi.

Add one thing. Beyond natural encounters, joining one interest-based activity—a club, a group, a weekly event—creates another set of repeated encounters with a different group of people. The goal isn’t to find a best friend immediately. It’s to widen the pool.

One counterintuitive finding worth sharing with your student: random roommate assignment actually produces more lasting friendships than when students try to match themselves in advance. Why? Because the students who are matched online based on shared interests often put all their social eggs in one basket—and when the roommate relationship has friction (as most do), they’re left more isolated. The students with randomly assigned roommates are forced to cast a wider net. What matters more than shared tastes is practical compatibility: sleep schedules, study habits, how you feel about having the door open.

Speaking of doors—keeping a dorm room door open is one of the simplest, highest-leverage things a first-year student can do. It signals availability. It creates the possibility of an encounter. Shared bathrooms down the hall, counterintuitively, produce more friendships than suite-style living—more hallway moments, more natural propinquity.

The 5-for-5 Challenge

One of the most research-backed, practical tools for building connection quickly is the Surgeon General’s 5-for-5 Challenge: for five consecutive days, make one intentional connection with someone new. After each interaction, take a moment to reflect on how it went.

Day one might be introducing themselves to a professor. Day two, talking to the person sitting nearby in class. The goal isn’t to find a best friend in five days. It’s to prove, through repeated positive experience, that connecting with new people is survivable—and often genuinely nice. By day five, someone says hi when they walk into class. That’s belonging, in its earliest form.

If your student wants to practice before they get to campus, the summer is a perfect low-stakes window. A summer job, a neighborhood coffee shop, any environment where they can practice the basics—”Hi, where are you from? What do you like to do?”—builds the muscle before the stakes feel high.

The Fears Students Don’t Talk About

When you ask students what worries them about college, the answers are rarely what parents expect. It’s usually not academic pressure at the top of the list.

It’s: How do I find a friend? And: What if I can’t manage the basics?

That second one is worth taking seriously. Even students at highly competitive universities will confess, in private, that they’re worried about finding an ATM. About figuring out where to get food. About operating a washer-dryer. These feel like silly concerns, but they’re real, and they add up. One of the most useful things a parent can do in the weeks before move-in is ask: “What’s one thing you’re wondering about that has nothing to do with academics?” Then work through it together.

The fear underneath both concerns is the same: Can I manage on my own? Will I belong? Almost every first-year student carries some version of this. And almost every first-year student believes, falsely, that everyone else has it figured out. They don’t. Everyone is confused. Everyone is making mistakes. The student sitting through a whole class before realizing they’re in the wrong room is not alone—they’re just human.

A Note for Parents: When to Step Back (and When Not To)

The instinct to protect is strong, and it doesn’t disappear when you drop your kid off. But here’s what students almost universally say they want: more independence than their parents are giving them.

The most useful framework for knowing when to intervene is what psychologists call the “too” test: Is what you’re observing too different from your child’s normal baseline? Has it lasted too long (every day for at least two weeks, not just a rough patch)? Is there too much spillover into multiple areas of their life? If the answer to those questions is yes, that’s a signal to engage — not to solve the problem, but to connect them with resources.

Before move-in, look up the counseling center at your student’s school. Know what’s available. Give your student the phone number and say, “This is here if you need it”—not as a warning, but as information.

When your student calls and something is hard, try to listen before you fix. Ask “What’s the problem?” and then “What’s another way you might think about it?” The goal is to be a problem-solving partner, not a problem-solver. The more your student practices agency— even small, imperfect agency—the more confident they become.

And when you say goodbye on move-in day? Find out how they want to stay connected, rather than assuming. Some students want FaceTime every few days; others need a couple of weeks to find their footing before they’re ready to talk. Both are normal. The question to ask isn’t “When should I call you?” It’s “What’s the best way for us to stay connected while you’re settling in?”

One Last Thing

In all the conversations about stress and belonging and coping skills, it’s easy to forget that college is also supposed to be joyful. It’s one of the rare times in life when so much is genuinely new—new people, new ideas, new possibilities for who a person might become.

The students who tend to thrive aren’t the ones who avoided all the hard parts. They’re the ones who stayed curious, kept showing up, and let the weird lettuce-eating contest be the thing that introduced them to their people.

Your student is ready for more of this than you might think. Tell them so.

This post was informed by CGN Live’s webinar “The College Transition: Are You Ready?” featuring educational psychologist Michele Borba (author of Thrivers), Peter Felten of Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning (author of Connections Are Everything), and Brennan Barnard, Director of College Counseling at CGN. Peter’s book is available free at Project Muse. The Surgeon General’s 5-for-5 Challenge toolkit can be found here.