Campaign uses hashtag to motivate students

A new campaign, #OCUgrit, promotes student resiliency through posters, buttons, and social media outreach.

#OCUgrit began as an idea from OCU’s Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT). BIT exists to develop proactive ways to promote mental health and healthy living. #OCUgrit is an acronym created to encourage students to bounce back from setbacks and failure:

G: Guts
R: Resiliency
I: Independence
T: Tenacity

“We see that college students struggle with day to day challenges of life, like roommate issues, relationship problems, or disappointing exam scores,” said Amy Ayers, vice president of student affairs and dean of students. “Research shows that those things are creating mental health challenges beyond what we think they should be. This campaign is our proactive way to encourage students to dig deep and press through challenging times.”

During Stars Week, Levi Harrel, assistant director of student development, took over the campaign, handing out buttons and hanging flyers. The social media aspect of the campaign will mainly appear on Twitter and Instagram, where OCU students are urged to post about ways they are pushing through a hard time, using the hashtag “ocugrit.”

“The goal is to use the campaign to help OCU faculty, staff and students band together and become resources for each other,” Harrel said. “The direction of the campaign depends on the student body, but in the end, we are motivating and inspiring the good that already exists at OCU.”

Harrel and other OCU officials plan to develop a system to award students with some kind of prize or drawing for wearing the #OCUgrit pins and using the hashtag.

“To me, grit means forgetting everything that happened in the past and taking on new adventures,” said Erin McDermitt, dance performance junior. “I’m looking at everything as a new adventure, and that’s motivating me.”

The campaign hashtag has been used on two tweets and six Instagram posts so far, including a first day of school picture and a video of Spencer Gualdoni, music theater senior, trying to high-five freshmen.