Bright Ideas: Host Sessions for Graduate and Professional Students and Their Partners

Graduate and professional students and their partners face some unique personal, financial and academic challenges. The new USA Funds^® Life Skills^® module, “Connect as a Couple — Confronting Relationship Challenges Together,” is designed to help students and their partners manage the changes and challenges that come from being married while in school.

Financial issues are of great concern to graduate and professional students and their partners. Financial-aid administrators can offer important sessions, particularly about school-related expenses and student-loan debt, to these students and their partners. The new USA Funds Life Skills module includes the following financial topics:

• Why Is Talking About Money So Problematic?
• Have You Discussed Your Financial Future Together?
• What's Your Secret?
• Does It Really Take Two to Manage Our Finances?
• What Additional Child-Care Expenses Should We Expect?
• How Can We Involve Our Children in Family Budgeting?

More details about each of these topics and how your students can handle them are available in the USA Funds Life Skills module, along with lists of valuable Web sites, references and resources. Students receive a Professional Resource Manual and an interactive CD-ROM. Presenters can work from a Trainer's Manual, along with a CD-ROM that provides a step-by-step training guide, PowerPoint presentations and the contents of the student CD-ROM.

Working with others on campus
Financial-aid administrators can partner with other campus departments, such as student-support services, to offer sessions based on the information in the new USA Funds Life Skills module. For example, Kim Brown, director of student financial services at Midwestern University, is working with campus counselors to offer a continuing series of sessions this summer. New students and their married partners or significant others will be invited to attend an ice-cream social at the conclusion of the first day of orientation. Other students will be on hand to take care of children while the parents learn some tips about handling the pressures of school and family life. Participants will attend a session in each of the first three months of school.

Brown plans to use a different approach in offering the sessions this fall, beginning with orientation. Under the supervision of campus counselors, third-year psychology students will assist in facilitating the sessions. Not only will new students benefit from peer counseling, but the psychology students will gain valuable practice in facilitating such a series.

For more information about USA Funds Life Skills, contact your debt-management consultant. You can order USA Funds Life Skills materials through the USA Funds Web site. Please allow two weeks for delivery of ordered items.