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Students Learn to “Cope with Conflict”

The University hosted a “Coping with Conflict” seminar in Mullaney Hall on Sept. 18 to discuss with students ways to handle common college issues and how to prevent them. 

Chris McKittrick, a University psychological counselor,  gave the presentation to explain the different ways students can learn from conflicts. “I’ve worked in residential life for six years and I’ve found that roommate conflicts have destroyed experiences,” said McKittrick.

“I knew that I needed to learn how to work through it [roommate conflicts] to strengthen relationships.” McKittrick exclaimed. As a result of the issues, the Counseling and Psychological Services held the “Coping with Conflict” seminar.

According to McKittrick, miscommunication is often one the main sources of a conflict. He continued that students need to learn to be honest with one another, because when their real thoughts and feelings are not communicated this can cause many issues between two people.

“I’ve learned that conflict needs to be confronted when there’s a problem,” Emily Argano, a freshman, said after watching the presentation.

Aside from relationship issues, many other types of conflicts were also discussed during the “Coping with Conflict” seminar. “My view of conflict has not changed because there are many conflicts, but ranges and types of conflicts have changed,” said Jeff Miele, The Area Coordinator of Resident Life.

Conflicts can be created when making decisions, Miele explained. Often, when there is a difficult decision to be made, people get stressed, and this creates conflict. The seminar explained that to resolve this issue is to think it over and find a solution.

To explain how to effectively choose solutions, McKittrick demonstrated an exercise. Imagine that “you have a huge project due in two days that you have yet to start and your friend e-mailed you concert tickets and you have four solutions: A) Delete the e-mail and pretend you never got it. B.) Acknowledge your friends and tell them you have to do a project. C.) Tell the teacher that your friends invited you to a concert and ask if I can send it in late and D.) Go to the concert anyway.” Each student responded to the questions differently depending on their personalities and previous experiences.

He later did some more scenarios about all types of different issues. Some were awkward encounters, others involved offending people, and a few discussed peer pressure. These exercises taught the students that every conflict has various options to act on, and everyone has different types of reasoning for the decisions they make.

After the exercises, McKittrick handed out a sheet of paper which presented students with a blueprint guide of how to deal with conflict. The blueprint contained the acronym “TIP-A-COW” and each of the letters provided students with ways to battle conflicts.

Overall, students felt that the seminar was beneficial and they learned valuable information. “From an RA’s perspective, I think that McKittrick’s presentation was really informative in how it showed different ways to handle situations,” said Jose Aguilar, a junior at the University. “There’s no clean cut way of handling conflict and he really emphasized the amount of ways to handle one.”