Handling Homesickness: Strategies for Success Transcript Originally Aired on Friday October 2, 2015 at Noon Good Afternoon and welcome to our Hawkeye Parents & Families Webinar Series. My name is Danielle Martinez and I work in Academic Support & Retention and will the moderator for today’s webinar. These monthly webinars are designed to integrate parents & family members as stakeholders in your students’ education and provide you with up to date information that may apply to your student’s transition to the University of Iowa. We understand you are an important part of your students’ support system and they may continue to seek your advice and guidance on many issues ranging from roommate concerns, grades, or health resources or what to do in their courses. Therefore, we want you to be an informed resource for your student. We hope that these webinars provide a platform for us to consistently engage with you by providing a proactive, open forum for questions, concerns, and dialogue. Today’s webinar is Handling Homesickness: Strategies for Success Hosted by: Academic Support & Retention and University Counseling Service. We are fortunate today to have Doctor Paula Keaton as our presenter. Paula serves as the Director of Clinical Services at University Counseling Service. And as a licensed psychologist, Paula is committed to social justice and leadership and some of her specialty areas include relationship and family concerns, and self-esteem concerns. Some of you may remember Paula from her amazing session during summer orientation, entitled, Letting Go. I know that it’s my favorite session every year at orientation. Today Paula will address strategies for success for your student when dealing with issues of homesickness. As a reminder, each webinar is recorded and then posted on the Academic Support & Retention website so it can be accessed at a later date or viewed by individuals who were not able to attend the live webinar. Therefore, during the presentations, your mic functions will be muted. Later we will have a Question & Answer portion, where you can use the raise hand function or type in your question into the question box on the side. So without further ado, we will take it away with Paula. Program Handling Homesickness: Strategies for Success Paula: Thank you, Danielle. As she said, we are going to be talking about homesickness today. And not only about homesickness, but how it impacts your student and their success. And I do want to point out, my voice is coming in and out a little bit from allergies, it’s not your speaker, it’s my voice and I may be clearing my voice a little bit every once in a while. I’m in my office there in my picture at the University Counseling Service, and we’ll have an opportunity to talk about those services in a little bit. So I have a few goals that I’d like to lay out for us today. The first one is to gain a clear understanding of what homesickness is and what homesickness isn’t. I think we all make some assumptions about that but really learning to recognize that homesickness looks different for each person. Secondly, hopefully we can get some further understanding about the impact that homesickness can have on student success, and we will be talking it here specifically at the University of Iowa. Third, hopefully we can identify some ways in which you can best support your homesick student, I’m of the belief system that creativity is going to be your best friend in this Academic Support & Retention University of Iowa 319.335.1497 http://uc.uiowa.edu/family-resources 1 because I want to recognize that you do know your students best. We are here to support them but we know that you’ve been in that role up to this point where you’ve kind of handed them off to the University of Iowa. And lastly, I hope that you will be able to learn about resources here on campus, particularly University Counseling Service. That is what I’m going to be best versed in as we talk about these things. So, the first question. What is homesickness? Homesickness is the uneasiness, discomfort, distress, and/or impairment someone experiences due to being away from one’s familiar and safe environment. You’ll see those four highlighted words and that is how we are going to break down this first part of the webinar. We’re going to talk about uneasiness and what that looks like. Discomfort and what that looks like. Distress and what that looks like, and lastly, impairment. I do see homesickness on a continuum of sorts. Recognizing that everybody gets a little bit homesick, especially if we think about homesickness as an uncomfortable emotion one is experiencing when they are away from what is familiar and safe. For example, I know for myself, if I am on a long vacation, even though I’m on vacation and having an amazing time, I might get a little bit homesick. I might miss my dog, I might miss my house, but that is kind of in that uneasiness rail. I know that is kind of a weird example but I want you to know that homesickness can be really, really, really broad. Homesickness is not so much about one thing, it’s not about missing your stuff like your comfy bed or your comfortable pillow or that amazing tv that you may have on the wall at home. And it’s not singularly just about people, it’s often not just about you as parents, it’s not just about maybe the girlfriend or boyfriend or partner that the student is away from. It’s not just about pets, although that is often a target that will get students really emotional, if they talk about their pets back home. It’s not just about maybe the amazing meals you make for your student when they’re home. It’s a combination of all of these things. It comes down to this familiarity and notion and this notion of perceived safety. When students are feeling homesick, it is this lack of knowledge of what the environment is and how to work within it. So let’s break it down into these four areas. Let’s talk about uneasiness to begin with. As I mentioned, most folks experience some level of uneasiness in new environments and that could be going to a new work place that could be coming to the University of Iowa for the first time. It might mean moving into a new neighborhood. It’s a really, really common experience, this notion of uneasiness. And most college students, they do experience some level of homesickness and I do mean most college students, even those students who are super independent. They do experience some amount of longing for that which is familiar. And that which is familiar is often you, your home, the environment, and as I said, a combination of a lot of things. With this notion of uneasiness, we are talking about mild homesickness. It’s really a very typical reaction to period of rapid change and adjustment like beginning college. You know one day they’re at home with you, they know their routine and they have all this familiarity, and then the next they’re here riding on campus with 5,000 other new folks into a community of 30,000 plus, you know big buildings, a big environment. For some of you in smaller towns, the student’s residence hall maybe has more people than their entire hometown. This is a big change for many students and they struggle with getting their minds wrapped around it. Conversely, you may be in a more urban environment where you come to Iowa City and the University of Iowa and it feels like small town, USA. It feels like everybody knows your business. So it really is a matter of perspective, and it’s change and adjustment, it doesn’t matter if it’s from big to small, small to big or somewhere in between. With uneasiness about homesickness being so common, it does transform into easiness or comfort when a student makes friends or when a student finds a routine. When a student discovers what his or her or their new normal might be. It does require some effort by the students but the environment is built to make that effort kind of easy especially if they’re in a residence hall. So again, this notion of uneasiness about homesickness, it is so typical and so many students are experiencing it. Academic Support & Retention University of Iowa 319.335.1497 http://uc.uiowa.edu/family-resources 2 So that next step is discomfort. And discomfort really is one step further along on the homesickness continuum. This is when notions of worry, nervousness, and mild sadness are beginning to creep in. It’s not at a super troublesome level at this point, and maybe your student is getting cranky or maybe a little over reactive to things you might say. You know I think people at this level of homesickness, they get a little snappy and discounting. And maybe what was helpful before isn’t helpful now, but you know it’s starting to move along the continuum. Within this too, the calls home to you may increase and become more emotional. And again, maybe you might find that your student is experiencing again, maybe a small social slight, maybe they didn’t get invited to go down to dinner with the roommate, but it feels like a very, very big violation.