TCG: Growing Away to College (ft. Virginia “Ginger” Wickline)

Growing Away to College

A Strozier Faculty Lecture Series conversation with Dr. Virginia (Ginger) Wickline

College isn’t easy — whether during “normal” times or in the midst of a pandemic. But “adjusting” to college is more than engaging in a new level of academics. There are also new friends, new responsibilities, and new temptations … plus that whole “planning a path” for the rest of one’s life. How do (and should) students navigate their years in higher education? How are they coping now? Dr. Virginia (Ginger) Wickline, assistant professor of psychology, joins Leigh this week for a follow-up conversation to her Strozier faculty lecture, presented to the wider community as a WRUU and Georgia Southern University collaboration.

(Photos © Georgia Southern University and FreeImages/Afonso Lima)

To skip the intro, fast forward to the 2:24 mark.

• Part of the Robert I. Strozier Faculty Lecture Series
• “Who’s Doing OK? What ‘College Adjustment’ Really Means”
• Virginia (Ginger) Wickline
• Abstract Students have many stressors, changes, and challenges to navigate when coming to college. Historically, college adjustment measures have been fairly limited in scope, measuring adjustment that is relevant for a clinical context with at-risk students (e.g., anxiety, depression, suicide). In order to better assess how student populations are adjusting to college, a broader, more holistic measure of college-life adjustment was developed: The Wooster-Wickline College Adjustment Test (WOWCAT). Consisting of ten subscales, the WOWCAT collectively assesses self-reported levels of adjustment in myriad domains: Friendship/Social Life, Living Arrangements, Extracurricular Involvement, Academic Performance/Study Habits, College-Specific Anxiety, College-Specific Depression, Problematic Substance Use, Family Relationships/Support Network, Learning to be Independent, and Coping/Resources. The WOWCAT was initially developed and successfully analyzed with a primarily White, exclusively residential student population at a small, private, liberal arts college in the Midwest more than a decade ago. However, it also validly and reliably measures college adjustment in our current, more diverse, more nontraditional and military-involved and partly-commuter population at Georgia Southern. Dr. Wickline introduces and advocates for the use of this measure in whole or in part by staff and faculty to enable students for a successful journey through university life.