Tag Archives: dean’s desk

Support Systems to Help Students in Crisis

It’s high stress time on campus. Students who are getting ready to graduate are freaking out about the terror of the “real world” (who can blame them?). They’re worried about getting jobs or getting in to grad school; they are worried about paying back their student loans; they are worried about moving home.

Then, on the underclassman front, we have students stressed about getting internships, about where they will live next year and with whom, about looming final exams, about relationships and about dozens of other life challenges.

The good news for us is that most of this is situational stress and situational stress abates as soon as the irritant goes away. You cram like mad for an exam. Then you take the exam and mentally move that worry to the done column. The trick is to learn to manage the stress and cope in a way that facilitates problem solving rather than stifles it. You’ve got tons of school work to do and can’t cope so you smoke weed. That’s bad. Same scenario and you seek out tutoring and study well in advance of a difficult final. That’s good!

Mental health wasn’t talked about when I was a college student. There were no counseling services and the rare student who was unable to cope with the stress and anxiety of college life quietly withdrew from school and recuperated at home. Those days are gone. Universities have recognized that college life is fraught with stress and have created support systems to help students in crisis. Society no longer shames people with mental illness and students are educated to seek help.

All that should mean we are winning the battle against mental illness, but it’s complicated. Students come to college with serious mental health conditions. The college years – traditionally ages 18 to 22 – are also times when mental health problems surface. Is your student aware if there is a family history of mental illness? Don’t be afraid to talk about this with your students – they might be relieved to know this important fact.

Parents may wonder how they will know whether their student is suffering from anxiety, stress, suicidal thoughts or other mental illnesses and what to do for them. The best advice if you are worried about your student’s mental health is to not be afraid to ask questions. Our desire to respect our almost-adult’s privacy sometimes gets in the way of important inquiry. Ask your student about their sleep habits, about their level of stress and their coping plan. Are they exercising? What are their eating habits?

Here on campus our counseling services include education and treatment. We have workshops about stress, groups that focus on eating disorders, anxiety, grief and other issues. We have online mental health assessments that students like to use to gauge their alcohol dependency, eating disorders, depression and anxiety. For some students, these serve as a wakeup call that they need help.

Now that students are getting ready to come home for summer vacation, you should look for changes in behavior, personal hygiene and attitude.

Katherine Evans, Ed.D., our director of Counseling and Psychological Services, says the one big red flag for parents is any whiff of suicide. “Learning that the student is thinking of suicide, has rehearsed a suicide or has attempted suicide requires a proactive response.”

In addition, Dr. Evans recommends the resources of the JED Foundation, which has a program called “Set to Go,” which helps families and students understand the stresses of university life.

We know our children better than anyone else. We know their habits, their quirks and their usual reactions to life’s challenges. That why is so important for us, the parents, to be aware of the warning signs of a mental health condition. The JED foundation lists 10 specific signs that should prompt action:

1. Feeling very sad or withdrawn for more than two weeks;
2. Severe, out-of-control risk-taking behaviors;
3. Sudden overwhelming fear for no reason;
4. Not eating, throwing up or using laxatives to lose weight;
5. Seeing, hearing or believing things that are not real;
6. Repeatedly and excessively using drugs or alcohol;
7. Drastic changes in mood, behavior, personality or sleeping habits;
8. Extreme difficulty in concentrating or staying still;
9. Intense worries or fears that get in the way of daily activities; and,
10. Trying to harm oneself or planning to do so.

“There is no one thing that will definitely alert parents to problems and students often go out of their way to avoid disclosing problems to parent,” noted Dr. Evans. Yet, she says, parents generally “are supportive and play an important role in helping our students get or stay in needed treatment.”

Success of Seton Hall’s “Gen 1” Program

I think I was the only kid in my grammar school class whose dad had gone to college. Of course, in the 1950s in working class Kearny, N.J., that wasn’t a big surprise. As our family folk lore goes, dad was a scholarship kid at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark and his family was so poor he had to walk back and forth from his home in East Newark to school because, in the depths of the Great Depression, there was no money for bus fare. So, in those days before the FAFSA and complicated federal funding of college access, dad’s education would have ended at high school, but luck intervened. My grandmother won the Irish Sweepstakes! Way to go, Grandma. Dad went to college.

That’s the kind of miracle it took in 1937 to get my dad through college. But, because he had gone, I always had the expectation growing up that I, too, would go to college. And with that expectation comes a big bonus. Students whose parents went to college have a better chance of graduating from college themselves. So, here I am 77 years after my dad completed his college degree with the happy job of analyzing our graduation rates and doing my best to help our students stay in college and finish up on time.

Our data shows that our first-generation college students (the ones whose parents never went) graduate at lower rates than the rest of our students. And Seton Hall is not alone. Dismal national statistics indicate that only 11 percent of first-gen students earn a degree within six years and more than 25 percent leave after their first year. Our figures are much better than the national averages, but we still have a way to go.

That’s why we’ve been paying extra attention to our first-gen students this year and backing up that attention with initiatives designed to help the students thrive and graduate. The reasons that first-gen graduation rates lag are varied. For many first-gen students, college is a mystery that they can’t turn to their parents for a solution. The students who are first have no point of reference as to what college is all about. The vocabulary of college, for example. What is a bursar or a provost? What does it mean to complete the Core Curriculum? Teaching students the lingo is the easy part, helping them solve other challenges, like family obligations, financial difficulties and a reticence to ask for help, is harder. Sometimes, to a first-gen student, it just seems easier to stop and get a job.

Last August, we ran a special program for first-gen students who were in commuting distance to campus. The 10-day program tackled some of the known obstacles. First of all, we invited the families of our 24 students to campus for a barbeque. Everyone came! We had siblings, grandparents, moms and dads. President Mary Meehan, herself a first-gen college graduate, welcomed the group. Freshman Studies explained the fall semester in detail and we went from family to family answering questions and breaking the ice.

For the next nine days, the students were exposed to the ins and outs of college life. Most importantly, they were taught how to ask for help, whom to ask and where to go when the going got rough. We’re trying to teach students to stand on their own for the first time.

In addition, the students were given a support team that included a Freshman Studies mentor, a Peer Adviser (both of them first-gen) and an academic coach.

An academic coach is exactly what it sounds like. Just as a sports coach teaches and advises from the sidelines, the academic coach helps a student make sound decisions about college life. I often ask parents to act as an academic coach – to provide the help and support and guidance that nudges students to good decision making.

The students who participated in our pilot are doing so well that we’ll be bringing the program back for next year’s freshman class. For our returning students, we welcome all our first-generation students to participate in our workshops and to take advantage of our offer of an academic coach. If you have a student who wants to benefit from these resources, coach them: tell them to shoot me an email at Tracy.Gottlieb@shu.edu. I’m always excited to help our students connect to the best path to graduation.

Conversation Around the Thanksgiving Table

Hindsight is 20/20. We’re all great Monday morning quarterbacks. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Whatever the cliché, it comes down to students lamenting in January what they should have done throughout the semester to ensure their academic success.

As we finish out the Fall Semester, our students need to evaluate their status in each class and figure out just what effort they need to put in to cross the finish line with the desired (and sometimes required) outcome. You can help them with this crucial assessment.

As you search for topics of conversation around the Thanksgiving table, you might want to nudge them in the right direction with some targeted questioning. Start by asking who teaches each class. If your student doesn’t know the professor’s name (and it’s the final weeks of the semester), that could be a red flag. Ask your student about each course specifically — what’s the most interesting thing about the class, what work is outstanding.

Ask your students if they received an Early Warning. If so, what did they do to ameliorate it? An early warning is an electronic notice that a student is struggling or failing to meet the attendance requirements. Not all professors send warnings to students, but we know that when students receive them they often are able to get their act together and improve.

Ask about pre-registration. What are they scheduled to take next semester? Students should be done with spring registration by the time they come home at Thanksgiving. Students who are engaged and content are usually excited about registration and about what they are taking next semester.

Ask about their roommates – what’s the most annoying thing about the roommate? What’s the best thing? What are they thinking about housing arrangements for next year?

Ask if they read their university email. Reading email is the difference between success and failure. There are nearly 10,000 students at Seton Hall. It would be nice if we could send a personalized text to every student each time there is important information to convey. But the reality is: we send emails. Students complain they get too many so they don’t bother to read them. Really? There are financial ramifications that affect you, the parents, when students ignore emails. Late fees are imposed on tuition bills, students are charged for health insurance when they already have family health insurance. All of these situations stem from students ignoring their university email.

Ask if they did the extra credit. In my 35+ years of college teaching, I have observed that it is the students who DON’T need the extra credit who do the extra credit (which may explain why they don’t need the extra credit!). Every chance I get, I ask students if their professors have given them the opportunity to earn extra credit and I urge them to do it, just in case.

Ask them what’s the worst case scenario? I find this an enormously helpful question. This is best illustrated with a real-life slice of my life. During the summer, my son is scheduled to start a new job and I am doing my best to not ask too many questions or to be too pushy. So I keep my mouth shut after I asked, “All set for Monday?” on Friday evening and he replied, “Just got to fill out a few forms.” On Saturday, I couldn’t contain myself and asked, “Got those forms filled out?” but again backed down when he said he was on it. Fast forward to Sunday evening when I am sitting down to a re-run of 60 Minutes and he turns on the printer and it’s dead. A half-hour goes by as he fiddles with the connection, the cartridge, the scanner and the computer. Nothing. So now he is faced with the worst case scenario: he will go to work on the first day unprepared and with his homework not done. Not exactly the message you want to convey to a boss. So he turns to me for help at the 11th hour and I succumb. We head to Seton Hall on a Sunday night, open my office and print out his paperwork. He is extremely grateful and I resist the temptation for about half the ride home, but I can’t hold back any longer. “If you had imagined the worst case scenario for your procrastination, this never would have happened.”

I have sometimes described this as “Just in case the engine falls out of the taxicab,” which memorializes the time the engine fell out of the taxi on the way to Newark Airport for a trip to Hawaii. Thanks to my keen ability (honed by decades of motherhood) to imagine the worst case scenario, we still made our flight.

Our dean of Freshman Studies, Robin Cunningham, has a favorite saying for students, “It’s not about where you start, it’s about where you finish.” The university has the resources to provide your students a strong end game, from tutors-in-residence, the Writing Center, the Academic Resource Center and our end-of-the-semester tutoring event, Tutopia. And there’s still plenty of time to finish strong. Happy Thanksgiving!