Adaptation Peculiarities of the First-Year Students to University Life: Study on Stress Resistance

The paper is aimed at investigating adaptation peculiarities of the first-year students to university life. Among 105 first-year students selected for taking part in research 57 were internal migrants who had to change their place of residence and move to a student residential complex and 48 were original city residents who continued living at home. The research took place in 2018/2019 academic year at two Ukrainian universities. To promote research and collect data several diagnostic tools were used. To understand the leading concepts of research the methods of scientific literature analysis were applied. To process and interpret the obtained results the authors used the methods of mathematical statistics. The obtained results showed that stress resistance was the main source of successful adaptation of the first-year students to university life. Being self-resistant students-internal migrants seemed to know better how to deal with problems concerning their study and to be more open to interactions with their peers, family members and university teachers. At the same time facing unusual problems studentsoriginal city residents were not able to cope with them in a proper way and were more vulnerable to different stressors concerning university and personal life. The conducted research made it possible to define the difference between stress resistance of students-internal migrants and students-original city residents and to prove the correlation between adaptation and stress level.