My GREAT Day

In my last blog post I discussed the impact of GREAT Day and its meaning towards growth as described by the GLOBE. Something I left out of that post is that I too presented at GREAT day. All semester long I have been working on a group project about the stresses of college students.  A quick summery of the project is that the number of college students who report anxiety, stress, and depression as affecting their academic success has been rising for the past decade.  These factors cause many students, especially those who are high achievers, to turn to substance abuse as a way of coping. Additionally, on campus chemistry related majors and juniors are the most stressed demographics.  Also, Geneseo’s Student Health and Counseling Center Lauderdale is both overbooked and understaffed, yet it only sees 14% of the student body. Because the number of counseling staff is regulated by state funding (which is unlikely to change anytime soon) our group has suggested hiring and implementing a special librarian to help students -particularly juniors- to deal with their work load, as that that is most likely the main cause of their stress. This would be indented to work in the same way as the Math and Writing Learning Centers. We have also proposed that RA’s receive training to help students with their mental health problems, to at least be more understanding of them. This would improve the councilor-student ratio, which currently sits at approximately 80:1. In my previous post I mentioned how presenting at GREAT Day fulfilled the learning outcomes at described by the GLOBE. In this post I would like to take that thought and aim it towards my own research process. Beyond presenting whose outcomes I outlined in the previous post, by working on this group research I have fulfilled other requirements of the GLOBE as well. First is Quantitative, Computational, and Symbolic Reasoning.  Much of my individual work for this project was the extrapolation and interpretation of data sets. I had to compile over ten years off data (taken semesterly) on various factors regarding college student health. I then had to compile the data into graphs and analyze what they meant. From there, the group worked to symbolically reason what could be causing those changes. I would also like to highlight Leadership and Collaboration. As I have mentioned, this was a group project, one that I conducted with four other students. Contrary to my actions in this class, I was (arguably) the group leader for this project. While all of us communicated immensely throughout the semester, I took a particular lead in determining what information was relevant to the project, especially as we put our poster together. As a whole, after reflecting on it, I can clearly see that working on collaborative research projects such as this one have allowed me to grow as a student.

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