What Does It Mean for Ages 17-24 to Thrive? A Four-Week Course

The purpose of this thesis is to see if a correlation exists between young adults’ personal perception of thriving and a curated online and written course centered around thriving. The course, What Does It Mean for Ages 17 – 24 to Thrive, took place over the span of four weeks and focused on concepts of personal strengths, goal setting, gratitude and thriving. Through this course, students were expected to complete daily practices, weekly challenges and weekly reflections to help build healthy habits for their overall well-being. This course was created in hopes of seeing an improvement from the student’s levels and perception of thriving before and after the course. To collect data, the study began with qualitative interviews to gain an understanding of the participants and their current level of thriving. Throughout the duration of the course, data and feedback was gathered through the students’ assignment submissions every week. As the course came to a close, data was collected through a final round of qualitative interviews focusing on the students’ biggest takeaways from the course. In analyzing the data, one of the biggest challenges came from the students not having enough time to complete all of the daily practices. However, every student mentioned they were able to take something away from this course and hope to implement the exercises into their daily lives. One significant finding came from the survey question, “Do you actively think about your purpose in life?” Prior to the course, there was a mixture of responses stating yes, no, and somewhat. However, after the course, almost every student responded “yes” and one student responded “somewhat.” Overall, it is evident that young adults hope to thrive in life, however, their biggest challenge comes from finding enough time for themselves outside of school and work. This course allowed students to put thriving into perspective and allowed them all to grow.