The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1519877
This article is part of the Research Topic Empowerment Through Education Innovative Interventions for Higher Education Students View all 9 articles
Career intervention program to promote academic adjustment and success in higher education
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
- 2 Psychology Association of the University of Minho (APsi-UMinho), Braga, Portugal
The transition to higher education can be challenging for many students, requiring developing skills and strategies to help them overcome various challenges. Adjustment to university is a multifaceted process involving several dimensions. Given the difficulty that a significant percentage of students face in this process, the lack of adaptation to higher education has been widely studied, as it is often associated with academic failure and dropping out of school. To mitigate these risks, career interventions have emerged as an essential support, helping students to develop personal resources such as resilience, time management, and decision-making capacity. The aim here is to present a career intervention program focused on promoting the adjustment and academic success of first-year undergraduate or integrated master's students and evaluating the participants' feedback on this intervention. Methodology: This intervention program aimed to provide students with an opportunity to reflect on their adjustment process to the University, identifying possible areas of vulnerability, providing personalized feedback, and proposing modules of learning and personal and academic development that would favor the adjustment and academic success process. Additionally, it aimed to organize, systematize, and make known the support structures existing at the University to which students can resort in possible situations of psychosocial vulnerability and support for academic and career development. This intervention was based on and used a computer platform developed within the framework of the SUnStar project. The intervention took place over six weeks using the Teams platform and consisted of three modules, with module two divided into different sessions and topics. Seventy-four university students participated in the intervention, 56 (75.7%) of whom were female. A questionnaire with four Likert-type questions was designed to evaluate the sessions by the students. Results: The session "Pursuing my UMinho Career: Institutional Support Structures" consistently received the highest ratings across multiple evaluation criteria. In contrast, the "Social Networks and Cooperation" session received the lowest, although all sessions were rated above the average response point. The results are discussed regarding their relevance in an academic context and their implications for future interventions with this target group.
Keywords: career intervention1, higher education2, adjustment process3, Psychology4, students5
Received: 30 Oct 2024; Accepted: 03 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sampaio, Carvalho, Taveira and Silva. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Célia Sampaio, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
Ana Daniela Silva, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.