Self-Care as an Indicator of Success for the Undergraduate Music Education Major

Despite rising awareness of stress and mental health issues, many undergraduate music education majors struggle to connect self-care to resilience in personal and professional areas of their lives. Students may perceive self-care as an extra luxury, if they have time after their work is completed, but they fail to recognize self-care as a potential source of energy, creativity, and joy for their work. The missing self-care component creates an internal deficit hindering students’ ability to bring their best self to the classroom, their student teaching placements, and interpersonal relationships. Omitting self-care compounds issues caused by their multi-faceted workload leaving students exhausted and overwhelmed. Recognizing the challenges implicit within the life of a typical music education major and grasping students’ current relationship to self-care are foundational to understanding how faculty can further support students, by developing interventions to help address their needs and pave the way for innovative approaches. The convergent mixed methods correlational study presented in this thesis examined undergraduate music education majors’ current practices regarding self-care and its correlation to their mental health, relationship quality, and academic outcomes. It measured the perceived value of self-care and correlations to gender, race, and academic classification, and explored obstacles and perceptions regarding self-care.