Flix Tutoring With Movie 'Everything, Everything' for First-Year Students

By Joel Brown on June 9, 2017

So you just moved out of your parent’s house and had a long flight to the college campus, where you will be starting your first year as a student. After unpacking your luggage, and folding up the empty boxes to bring out to the recycling bin later, and while laying on the bed to take a break, thoughts about the likeness of your new roommate cross your mind along with some college freshman fears that want to confine you in your room.

If only you knew a senior or junior to help you navigate through the college life. Well here’s the next best thing … a movie with a character who’s in a similar situation can help mentor you from the screen. So, that’s what we’ll do with the Everything, Everything movie while practicing creative imagination to help build confidence in you for your first year in college.

tagline: "Risk everything... for love."

Poster design by P+APhotography by Brian Bowen SmithFrom Internet Movie Poster Awards

 

Pulling character strengths out of Maddy’s character to help you succeed

In the movie ‘Everything, Everything‘ we see the following:

“Maddy is a smart, curious, and imaginative 18-year-old who is unable to leave the protection of the hermetically-sealed environment within her house because of an illness. Olly is the boy next door who won’t let that stop them from being together. Gazing through windows and talking only through texts, Maddy and Olly form a deep bond that leads them to risk everything to be together, even if it means losing everything.” (qtd. Trailers app, Warner Bros. Pictures 2017)

The main character from the movie is Maddy. It looks like she is located in San Franciso, California as this takes place during a modern-day time.

Maddy has just come from her bedroom that is in her home, from the look of it. Maddy seems to want to get someone to put their faith in her. Moreover, she wants to get someone to take a risk for the reasons of freedom, love, friendship, and an outside relationship.

Furthermore, Maddy just looks like she wants to experience life as an adventure, not just as it’s passing by her window. In contrast, if Maddy doesn’t get it now she will most likely stay in the box, home sick and confined to her room with an illness. Furthermore, Maddy may never get to see if she can overcome her illness if she doesn’t take a leap of faith and risk everything to do everything that she could ever dream of in venturing out to experience her heart’s desires.

So Maddy will probably get what she wants by using the character strengths of creativity, curiosity, love of learning, perspective, bravery, perseverance, zest, love, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, leadership, appreciation for beauty and excellence, humor, spirituality, and hope.

Thus, Maddy must overcome the protection of her hermetically-sealed environment, her illness, and the fear of failure, along with overcoming any negative thoughts that might be going through her head, like I’ll have problems meeting new people and making friends. I’m going to be home sick. I’m concerned about my finances. I’m nervous about being on my own for the first time. And I might not know what to do after I get out.

Using Maddy’s movie life as an example for your first year of college

First, let’s take all of the character strengths that we just saw through Maddy’s character and apply it to our life. These are the character strengths that can be seen from the movie: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, perspective, bravery, perseverance, zest, love, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, leadership, appreciation for beauty and excellence, humor, spirituality, and hope.

Second, let’s return to the movie to look for scenes that would give us examples of some practical ways to apply these character strengths to our own lives during the first-year of college.

Courage: It doesn’t have to be a big thing as it can be a small and silent action. Maddy showed courage and the virtues of bravery, perseverance, and zest whenever she got out of a chair or bed to go look out the window, in spite of her fear to leave the house. This could be seen as momentum for the next step to living an adventure outdoors, and for you in your first-year of college maybe this could be the same as what Maddy did in getting up and looking out the window to find the inspiration for motivation to want to leave your room.

Wisdom & Knowledge: There are ways of knowing about the world that’s apart from technology, and one way that was seen in the movie is through magazine clippings and Maddy’s cellphone. Particularly, in the movie Olly had put a collage of pictures up in the window in Maddy’s room of all the places in the world that she desired to go to inspire her to action. Through this, Olly was inspiring Maddy to take the risk for her dreams, and creativity, curiosity, love of learning, and perspective were also shown. Thus, by hanging these pictures up on Maddy window it was casting a vision of her dreams for her to see daily and it was like calling things that could be, not as though they were.

By doing this, Maddy would be motivated with the strength and hope to see it through. Whereas, for you, as a first-year student this could look like maybe researching all the events that are happening around the college campus and making a list of all the things that you want to do while you are in college to pin up on your mirror or window. Then, start to plan the things that you want to do around your class schedule. You can do this by getting a daily planner book and making it a goal to at least try to set out to accomplish one or more things a day on this list.

Humanity: If you’re an introvert or not a people-person and have been looking for a way to get out of it, then one thing you could do is to use the method of communication that you are most comfortable with to help ease you into having a face-to-face conversation with a person. For instance, in the movie, Maddy develops this character strength of humanity along with the virtues of love, kindness, and social intelligence through note writing and text messaging.

As a result, it led her to make friends with the boy next door and he started to come over to have face-to-face conversations with Maddy outside her window which also helped support her in seeing her dreams accomplished. Also, making time for another person can not only help you to get things done, but it can help you to get to your destination much faster. This can tie into the character strength of justice with the virtues of teamwork, leadership, and fairness that can also be seen through Maddy’s character as she and Olly basically didn’t let her four walls keep them from doing life together; rather they found a different way to communicate.

Transcendence: From this character strength followed the virtues of appreciation for beauty and excellence, humor, spirituality, and hope that seemed to have helped Maddy to live a life of meaning and purpose even when she was confined in her house. In fact, “Transcendence occurs when an individual moves beyond the ordinary range of human experience and understanding. The strengths that accompany this virtue help the individual make connections with the universe and provide a deeper sense of meaning and purpose” (Niemiec and Wedding).

For example, Maddy showed this strength of transcendence when she decided to leave the protection of house and risk death by exposing her illness to the outdoor elements for the sake of love and living life to the fullest. Similarly, you can do the same by seeking the things you find around the campus that bring meaning and purpose to you as these things will help you in making connections with the universe.

Lastly, one thing that has helped me in my first year of college and throughout is knowing my major and knowing what I want to do when I get out. This can also be linked to the movie Everything, Everything because Maddy had to first know what particular subject gave her a sense of meaning and purpose before she could find the dream that she wanted to live in order to know what she wanted to do when she got out of the house, and after that everything seemed to go according to plan.

So I want to challenge you to watch the movie again, but this time practice creative imagination for more insights into how the movie might help you think outside the box for living abundantly through your first year of college.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”

Howard Thurman

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