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The Path to Resilience
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Pooja Potdar, Allison Willoughby

This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0

The Path to Resilience

As Utah State University establishes Utah’s first 4-year, standalone Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Program, we encountered a common challenge in vet education: wellness is essential yet often too broad or extracurricular, making it difficult for students and faculty to engage meaningfully with it. In response, the Path to Resilience Framework was developed. The talk will offer an overview of the framework’s design rationale, development process, and curricular integration. Considering the challenge that prompted this work, we asked: Which aspects of wellness belong to the core curriculum? The literature consistently pointed to resilience. It is evidence-based and professionally relevant across veterinary career stages. We adopted the idea that resilience must be understood before it is practiced, and drawing on prior research, the infographic views resilience as a dynamic process involving interactions among personal and contextual resources and active strategies. It serves as both a teaching tool and a reflective scaffold, enabling students to identify and revisit resilience resources in different contexts, over time. The infographic was integrated into the Year 1 Professional Skills curriculum. Students engage with the framework several times through resilience sessions, reflection activities, and professional identity assignments spanning multiple semesters. This ongoing engagement helps students recognize how resilience resources and strategies evolve within specific learning environments. Across the curriculum, the framework provides a shared language for resilience and career longevity, so by sharing our experience, we hope to demonstrate how a visual artifact can anchor wellness in coursework and normalize changes in professional identity over time.

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