A live resilience experience for college students
Helping students develop the self-awareness, emotional regulation, and personal agency to navigate pressure, setbacks, and uncertainty—without losing sight of who they are becoming.
Spoken & featured in
The college transition
College brings new freedom, new expectations, and new questions. Students may be balancing academic pressure, relationships, finances, family expectations, uncertainty about the future, and the challenge of finding where they belong.
When life does not unfold as planned, students need more than encouragement to keep going. They need practical tools to understand what they are experiencing, respond to difficult moments, seek support, and make choices aligned with the person they want to become.
college students report an excellent or above-average sense of belonging on their campus.
Inside Higher Ed / Generation Lab, 2025of college students have considered dropping out of school because of financial stress.
The Hope Center for College, Community & Justice, 2024of college students say they’ve struggled with their mental health since starting college.
U.S. News & World Report / Generation Lab, 2024Numbers like these are why the experience has to work as hard as the message does.
The experience
Resilience: Who Are You Becoming? is a 45–60-minute live experience that helps college students explore how they respond to pressure, disappointment, change, and uncertainty.
Through relatable stories, honest conversation, guided reflection, and practical strategies, students are encouraged to recognize what they can control, reconnect with their strengths, and move forward with greater intention.
Students leave encouraged to:
Why Yaya
Yaya meets students where they are — creating a relatable experience that teaches them to embrace hardship and face it head-on.
“I don’t come to give students another lecture. I create an experience they can feel.”
Built to fit your programming
Orientation
A launch-point experience for incoming students, setting the tone that this campus is a place they belong before the first class even starts.
Student success
A session built for the students navigating college without a map at home — direct, felt, and grounded in Yaya’s own first-generation story.
Leadership
A deeper working session for student leaders, RAs or peer mentors — going further into voice, agency and building resilience in others.
Bring the conversation to your campus
Resilience: Who Are You Becoming? is a meaningful addition to orientation, first-year experience, student-success, leadership, residence-life, and campus-wellness programming.