This research introduced resilience characteristics to study the adjustment of international graduate students at American universities. The purpose of the study was to explore relationships among resilience characteristics and background factors; among resilience characteristics and adjustment problem areas; and among adjustment problem areas and background factors. The Personal Resilience Questionnaire and the Michigan International Student Problem Inventory were used in this study. All together 289 unusable responses were gathered from two universities. Correlation studies, t-tests, One-way ANOVA, and Tukey analyses were used. Statistical analyses revealed that: resilience characteristics were moderately correlated with background factors, highly negatively correlated with adjustment problem areas, and better correlated with adjustment problem areas than were background factors. Hence resilience characteristics are central to adjustment. (Contains 6 tables.)