YOWB: Testing the Effectiveness of Faculty as Facilitators of Psychological Resilience Interventions for Students in Professional and Graduate Programs

We will use our funding to establish a program of research regarding the efficacy of intervention strategies at the graduate and professional school level. Our project, piloted at Pitt Law over the last six years, involves putting into place a tailored and targeted set of interventions for graduate and professional school students. The inventions are based on a solid understanding of our students’ experiences and draw upon research involving the role of mindset in student success. There have been many evidence-based programs designed to study and mitigate K through 12 and undergraduate students’ maladaptive mindsets and outcomes, but there have been few research programs that examined graduate and professional schools, considered graduate school and professional students’ mindsets, or addressed the needs of graduate and professional students. Our project has sought to fill this gap, with an eye toward modernizing and humanizing the legal education system, making it more inclusive, and helping students maintain balance. Our research aims to create more successful students, and in turn, make Pitt the desired location for training high achieving professionals. This program will serve as a model for other law schools and professional and graduate school programs