“Slow down. Calm down. Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. Trust the process.”

—Alexandra Stoddard

Ways of “being” focus inward and on cultivating greater awareness. Habits of “doing” are focused outward.

Toward achieving selected goals, our habits of doing are oriented to our surroundings and our interactions with others. Society can seem to place more emphasis and value on what you accomplish than how you do so or who you are as a person. In response, you may feel compelled to achieve “more,” perhaps by trying to do things faster and, perhaps, simultaneously. Among high achievers, “busyness” can become a competitive, normalized state. Indeed, sustaining a chronically hectic pace can become a process that fuels itself, challenging you to maintain untenable workloads over extended periods and, potentially, compromising your wellbeing.

Our Honors Programs team views the “being” and “doing” components of the College Scholars Program as highly interconnected. As such, we endorse a holistic, collaborative approach to supporting student learning and development, and to helping you establish complementary ways of being and habits of doing that can help you succeed at UCLA and beyond.

There is no precise, universally applicable recipe you can follow to thrive academically, personally, professionally, or otherwise. Rather, we encourage you to consider your undergraduate career as an opportunity to embrace taking responsibility for designing experiences that help you accomplish what you aspire to “do” in ways that also enable you to be your best version of you.

Please click on the images below to learn more about the approaches to learning and ways of being that characterize the College Scholars Program.

For an introduction to the College Scholars curriculum and program requirements, click here.