Abstract
Academic setbacks during the first year of college are often framed through the constructs of academic resilience, academic buoyancy, and grit, which emphasize adaptation and recovery. Scholars have paid less attention to how students interpret academic setbacks over time and how early disruptions shape academic identity. This qualitative study used narrative inquiry to explore how college students made sense of a self-defined academic setback that intersected with their first year and how those meanings endured and evolved across later academic experiences. Participants were currently enrolled students at a predominantly White public institution who were at least one year removed from their first-year setback. I collected data through semi-structured interviews and analyzed them using in vivo, open, and within-participant pattern coding, which led to the development of a narrative arc grounded in participants’ stories.
Three recurring movements emerged across narratives: expectation, disruption, and reorientation. Expectation functioned as a narrative baseline that shaped early assumptions about effort, belonging, and competence. Disruption marked moments when those assumptions fractured, unsettling identity rather than focusing solely on performance. Reorientation captured how participants renegotiated their relationship to effort, success, and self through processes of carrying forward, repositioning, and decentering. Students carried setbacks forward as enduring interpretive reference points that shaped later academic decisions; participants repositioned their identities, goals, and definitions of success; and in some cases, students decentered the setback as its meaning shifted within a broader sense of self.
These findings reconceptualize academic setback as an identity-shifting event rather than an isolated obstacle to overcome and challenge outcome-oriented resilience discourse. They also offer implications for more relational and contextually responsive student support practices in higher education.