At Virginia Tech, counseling is woven into the spaces where students live, learn and build community. By placing mental health professionals directly within residence halls and academic departments, the university brings support closer to where students spend their daily lives, so they can access support in ways that feel more natural and familiar.
Claire Cabellos, assistant director of the university’s embedded counseling and residential well-being, says the initiative began in 2022, following COVID. It was part of a broader effort to reimagine student housing and wellness.
“It presented an opportunity to look at how we were fostering the general well-being of students,” she says, and to consider how to make a large college campus and community feel much smaller. Since then, the initiative has evolved into a model that connects counseling with everyday life.
Bringing counseling closer to where students live
Building on that vision, the residential embedded counseling program now operates out of East Eggleston Hall, where four counselors from the Thomas E. Cook Counseling Center provide on-site services and connect with students where they live. The counselors work in a first-floor office of the dorm.
Open to any resident, the program’s centralized location ensures students can access support quickly. In addition to convenience, the space itself is intentionally welcoming. Cabellos describes it as “inviting” and “relaxed.”
Just as importantly, proximity also helps normalize seeking support, says Cabellos. Counselors take “community walks” with student leaders, attend residence programming and collaborate with wellness partners to build trust and visibility.
Partnerships that build resilience
Also an essential component, the program thrives on collaboration among Residential Well-Being, Cook Counseling and Hokie Wellness, Virginia Tech’s public health agency.
“All of our residential well-being embedded counselors train student leaders on the Community Resiliency Model,” Cabellos says. “It teaches people about their nervous systems and evidence-based skills that create a shared language.”
Through this shared language, those skills—”grounding, resourcing, gesturing, tracking, help now and shift and stay”—empower students to build resiliency, adapt and bounce back from challenges, she explains.
Equally important, consistent communication keeps these partnerships strong. Each week, content experts from Hokie Wellness, ExperienceVT (a university community engagement initiative), Cook Counseling and the Dean of Students Office meet with the director of Residential Well-Being.
They discuss campus trends, student support strategies and new program rollouts, ensuring coordination across departments, Cabellos says.
Meeting evolving student needs with embedded counseling
That foundation of collaboration directly supports the mission to meet evolving student needs. Through these weekly meetings, the team maintains a “continual feedback loop,” that helps counselors respond to student needs in real time.
For example, the team sees common challenges such as transition stress, social adjustment and academic pressure. As awareness grows, more students reach out, Cabellos notes.
To connect with more students, Virginia Tech has since expanded embedded counseling across multiple academic units. Support extends to engineering, business, veterinary medicine and the Corps of Cadets.
“It’s not only the idea of meeting students physically where they are, but also influencing academic culture,” Cabellos explains. She says embedded counselors work closely with academic advisors and faculty members, which creates a systemic influence across departments.
Implementing embedded counseling programs
For other colleges looking to adopt the model, Cabellos says the success of the embedded counseling program stems from its focus on prevention, communication and structure.
“People tend to conceptualize that we need a lot of reactive services,” she says. However, “we’re trying to front-load preventative aspects—training, partnerships and shared language—so that people feel equipped to cope ahead.” She encourages other colleges to consider these elements when building their own programs.
To translate these ideas into action, the well-being content expert at Virginia Tech created “box programs” for student leaders—planned-out programs with objectives and materials—that other content experts now duplicate to promote their own missions, Cabellos adds.
“The beauty of the model is the empowering elements,” Cabellos concludes. “And because we have that partnership with Residential Well-Being, it gives us a different flavor and makes it more comprehensive.”
