Hoos Connected, a popular student orientation tool based in psychology, is doubling its capacity for the spring semester, as hundreds of first-year students prepare to move into their dorms for the first time after attending virtual classes from home in the fall.
The program is the brainchild of esteemed University of Virginia psychology professor Joseph Allen, who has published several impactful studies about the evolution of teenagers, including a blockbuster finding that kids deemed “cool” in primary school are more likely than their less-“cool” classmates to struggle later in life.
The concept for Hoos Connected is deceptively simple. Groups of up to 12 first-year and transfer students meet (virtually right now) with two facilitators weekly for 75 minutes to talk about ways to make new, healthy relationships. The goal of the nine-week program is to drive home the fact that new students are more alike than they think. Everyone is nervous. Everyone thinks everyone else has college all figured out. Everyone else gets college. You don’t.
Program director Alison Nagel says nothing could be further from the truth. And she has the numbers to back that up.
She and her team just analyzed data from the 2020 spring and fall semesters. They found that despite being forced online because of coronavirus and moving to a model where all facilitators are trained upperclassmen, Hoos Connected is helping students more than ever.
In a randomized control trial of two semesters worth of participants, 438 people, “We found that the students who participated in Hoos Connected reported feeling significantly less depressed than the control students,” Nagel said.