Campus Collaboration for Cadet Well-being

By Capt. Jamie McGrath, ’90, U.S. Navy (retired), Director, Major General W. Thomas Rice Center for Leader Development

One of the reasons I truly enjoy working here at Virginia Tech is the willingness of our campus partners to collaborate for student success. That collaboration is no more apparent than this year’s focus on improving cadet well-being. Working with partners across Student Affairs, we have introduced several well-being initiatives into the Corps Leadership Course curriculum and strengthened Corps support structures around cadet well-being. 

This effort began last year when the Rice Center for Leader Development partnered with Cook Counseling Center to introduce first-year cadets to the Community Resiliency Model (CRM)®. CRM is a campus-wide initiative that provides wellness skills designed to help students learn to track their nervous system’s response to stress and offers tools to bring the body, mind, and spirit back into greater balance. These tools focus on helping cadets transition from high school to college and improving their ability to complete new cadet training successfully. 

Building on the successful introduction of CRM, we partnered with Hokie Wellness and Residential Well-being to expand the tools and resources available to cadets. This comprehensive effort looked at all aspects of wellness – physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual – taking a layered approach to education and resourcing. 

We began at summer orientation by talking frankly about the stress of New Cadet training and the college transition. At the same time, we normalized the idea of stress, even embracing it with a growth mindset. Families left orientation with suggestions for conversations on the ride home, asking hard questions before arriving for new cadet move-in and discussing strategies for success together. 

Also included in these efforts was improved training for our cadet commanders, including Mental Health First Aid certification and more comprehensive CRM training. The training cadre was also introduced to CRM and trained in having hard conversations and helping those in distress – all with the goal of addressing challenges at the lowest level and keeping new cadets engaged in training. Cook Counseling also invested in the cadets’ mental health by hiring an embedded counselor for the Corps. With an office in the Corps Leadership and Military Science building, the embedded counselor gives cadets easy access to resources with someone who understands the circumstances of being a cadet.  

The Rice Center continued its partnership with New Student and Family Programs (NSFP) to provide our new cadets with the same college orientation their civilian peers receive by evolving our Hokies on Track sessions during New Cadet Week. This program, funded by NSFP, uses cadet facilitators to educate new cadets on the Virginia Tech Principles of Community and the expectations for the behavior of all Virginia Tech students, incorporating ideals set forth on the Pylons – Brotherhood, Honor, Leadership, Sacrifice, Service, Loyalty, Duty, and Ut Prosim. This year, Hokies on Track added another touch point for educating new cadets on the CRM model. 

The layering of resourcing continues by building on the introduction to CRM with additional training during the first-year Corps Leadership Course, including weekly exercises at the start of each class. We also bring in our Hokie Wellness partners to discuss financial and digital wellness and how to help their peers face and overcome struggles. The beauty of these discussions is that they translate directly into the positive leadership traits we put forth in the second semester 

Finally, in partnership with Hokie Wellness, Cook Counseling Center, and Residential Well-being, we consolidated access to health and wellness resources. Each cadet received a resource guide with key information about each resource, including its level of urgency, confidentiality, and the type of help provided. The Corps academic and well-being resources web page was revamped to mirror that resource guide with links to all the resources. To make the webpage more accessible, a QR code was printed on magnets that were placed in all cadet rooms and in the common spaces of the residence halls.  

Success in improving mental health and well-being is hard to measure. However, anecdotally, this effort appears to have improved the retention of first-year cadets and increased the number of cadets receiving assistance from the resources available. Surveys show that CRM skills have helped many cadets deal with seemingly overwhelming situations, allowing them to continue training (or studying, or the task at hand). 

As we assess this comprehensive effort to improve cadet well-being, we seek to build on its momentum by incorporating follow-on training into the sophomore Cadet Leadership Course and phase training plans. Our eventual goal is to have touch points of training and refreshers across all four years of the Corps experience so that cadets will learn skills in their first year that will carry with them as they mature to be able to apply them in leadership as seniors – and beyond.