Resilience and Student Integration in Higher Education

Entering the academic environment requires students to adapt to certain changes and accept challenges related to a new learning environment. Young people bring with them significant concerns and expectations regarding the organisational climate, the specific nature of activities, learning strategies, as well as social relationships. Many of these changes encountered by students often become overwhelming, exerting a varied psychological impact. This study is part of a more extensive programme aimed at maximising adaptive strategies and optimally integrating students into higher education, while enhancing resilience across all age groups. This investigative approach provides valuable quantitative data to design and implement support programmes, counselling, mentoring, and coaching. The study aims to highlight that, in the process of integration, each student’s ability to demonstrate resilience is crucial; this resilience implies certain complex adaptive systems that are, at the same time, in constant evolution, underscoring the dynamic process of adaptability. Thus, the university must offer both individual and group counselling packages tailored to the student’s specific needs. Understanding the factors that lead to successful academic adaptation is therefore essential in establishing intervention models and strategies to provide counselling and support to all students, with particular focus on those at educational risk. Accordingly, students' resilience and capacity for integration constitute a multi-faceted process, determined and closely linked to a network of interactions between psychological and interpersonal constructs.