Psychology of Flourishing Students Assess Their Own Strengths
Writes Professor Christine Vitale:
In Fall 2016 Psychology of Flourishing, students exchanged pen-pal letters with Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences students who were similarly studying positive psychology. In this assignment, the letter writers introduced themselves. They expressed their personal concepts of success. They described those moments when reader and writer felt pride in themselves and explained to each other what each regarded as his or her own “character strengths.” In the letter she exchanged with her pen pal, one student wrote this:
…Right now, I think I want to be a scriptwriter. I love to write. Watching my words come to life on the screen is very exciting and satisfying for me. I enjoy the fact that the resulting images are always different from the ones in my head when I originally wrote them, it’s the beautiful unpredictability of the medium. I think that art is a form of expression—a language—that has the potential to explain phenomena that cannot be described or summed up into words. I hope one day that my work will excite something within people that they cannot explain…. My greatest accomplishment is the fact that I am a junior in a fine arts college pursuing the career of my dreams. I am happy that I have come this far in spite of every challenge I’ve faced these past few years. I am also proud of being a good sister and daughter; it is so important to be kind to your family and to let them know that they are loved.
“If Hollywood Don’t Need You,” (1982), Don Williams
