Hilary Canavan

As a native Philadelphian living in London for 25 years, Hilary Canavan (Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology ’23) worked as a project manager as well as a mental health mentor supporting universities in the United Kingdom. She first encountered positive psychology when one of her mentees incorporated tools such as gratitude exercises into their sessions. “I could see how much affirmation she was getting from that approach, focusing on her strengths and resilience and creativity,” recalls Hilary. “It made an interesting contrast—I had most recently studied psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which represents a very different modality and mindset.” When Hilary returned to her hometown in 2020 and took a role managing a team of COVID-19 contact tracers for Wellness at Penn’s Public Health and Wellbeing division, she was excited to apply her employee tuition benefits toward Ivy League classes—and, with her prior experience in mind, enrolled in Penn LPS Online’s Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology.

“I wanted to study positive psychology more formally myself with a view toward integrating some of its tools in my support of students,” recalls Hilary. As a contact tracing team lead, her role initially entailed not only managing a team and tracking COVID-19 cases on campus but also calling students who tested positive for a holistic wellness check during their period of isolation. As the University pandemic response shifted over time, Hilary’s responsibilities broadened to encompass wellness education in student-oriented topics such as sleep hygiene, stress, and self-care. “Learning more about positive psychology has dovetailed quite nicely with that area of work as well,” she explains.

Hilary found the coursework immediately applicable—not just because self-assessment and reflection are essential tools of positive psychology. For example, the character strengths assessment helps students identify their own unique virtues. “When you learn what those strengths mean in terms of your personality and approach to the world, your approach to relationships and work… It is extremely supportive of self-awareness,” she says. “And it gives you a real sense of direction and purpose.” Beyond identifying her own traits, Hilary can help distressed students identify their own strengths and leverage them in a conversation about resilience or coping mechanisms that is tailored to the individual, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to wellness. But don’t mistake that personalized and empathetic approach for an unscientific one, she urges. One course she took, APOP 2900: Understanding the Science of Positive Psychology, is designed to clarify the difference between positive psychology interventions and popular self-help approaches that aren’t necessarily evidence-based. “It really got into the nuts and bolts of scientific literature: how do you know a change is really a change? How do you know that an intervention has a notable impact?” she says. “Coming from my professional perspective, let’s say we want to introduce meditation to a group of students. What does the research say on this? What are the conditions in which others have tested the efficacy of different types of meditation within specific populations?”

When she began the courses during the pandemic, Hilary was an experienced student but a first-time online learner. Remote learning “really suited that historical moment,” she notes, and also suited her schedule as a full-time employee serving a critical need on campus. “We would get surges of COVID-19 cases where we were working flat-out, nonstop…. and then we’d have ebbs and flows,” she recalls. “Some weeks might be tough to balance it all, but the flexibility allowed for continuous progress.” It helped to have clearly outlined expectations. “The pacing is such that you cannot fall behind. You do have a demand on you every week,” she says. “The time they suggest you need is precisely the time you need. I was able to readily meet the expectations because they were so well-articulated. And when you’re expected to produce something on a regular basis and interact with your fellow students, that enlivened the whole experience.”

In the virtual classroom, course material and student assignments may involve reading and writing and also discussions, videos, and podcasts. “I think they’re really taking advantage of the online platform and the varied ways in which you can deliver information. That blending of resources and modalities really contributed to my success in the course,” observes Hilary, who appreciated the ability to play back audio more than once and to listen from anywhere she worked. As another example, APOP 1000: Introduction to Positive Psychology required weekly Voicethreads, which is a tool that combines visual elements with a voice recording. Hilary and her diverse body of peers, who varied widely in age, profession, location, and other dimensions, listened to one another’s weekly presentations and provided feedback via audio comment. Listening to one another’s voices made their stories more intimate, says Hilary, and the asynchronous approach gave everyone time to consider their class contributions carefully. It also challenged her to embrace new modes of learning. “I never made a voice recording in my life. I never made a film before this course,” she laughs. “But positive psychology students are interested in self-reinvention—and that can be as pragmatic as learning how to edit a film on your phone for the first time as well as thinking differently about your approaches to making yourself happy.”

“The content, the exercises, the group work, all of that was really invigorating for me,” Hilary concludes. For her next steps to complete the four-course certificate, Hilary plans to focus on creativity—a topic that intersects with her interests in art history and photography—and resilience. “Resilience is something that’s required universally, no matter your experience. So, I think learning about it, recognizing it, fostering it, developing it both within myself and in my work with others has the broadest applications to support people,” she reflects.