Professor Debra Zeifman and Yiqing (Alice) Fan ’22, Psychological Science Department

This June, I worked with Professor Zeifman on designing a new course called The Psychologist’s Toolkit for Success and Wellbeing in College. This course aims to use scientifically tested strategies to assist students in succeeding academically, socially, physically, and mentally in college.

At the beginning of the project, recalling the problems that students encountered after entering college, we came up with a list of potential topics. The topics are divided into four categories:

1. Physical health and wellbeing (e.g. sleep hygiene and habits)
2. Studying habits (e.g. avoiding procrastination)
3. Social interactions (e.g. conflict resolution)
4. Others (e.g. academic integrity & mental health education).

For each topic, Professor Zeifman helped me come up with questions and search terms. Then, I used PsycINFO and Google Scholar to look for research papers that addressed these ideas. We tended to search for more recent studies that examined college students. After putting together titles, abstracts, and citations of the most relevant studies, I started reading them. I highlighted the articles that are suitable to be used as readings assignments for our course and wrote a short general impression and important takeaways for each paper. In the end, I compiled valuable information that was proven by surveys or experiments and produced a summary for each topic that could serve as the literature foundation for our course.

We did not finish all topics in a month and will continue working on this project this summer and next term. Our next steps include producing a working syllabus with potential reading assignments, carrying out a survey study that examines Vassar students’ academic integrity, and serving as a teaching/research assistant for the future course.