Adam Bonar and Isabel Yu

When starting our short interview with students hanging out in Trabant, we asked each of them the same question; “ On a scale from 1-10, how has your day been so far?” While it may seem upsetting, many of our peers ranked their day as a 6 or 7 and when we asked if there was any particular reason, they proceeded to describe that their Monday had just been mediocre and nothing more. “Content at best” is how one student put it. We were hoping to hear at least a few people describe something fun they were looking forward to or a positive experience they recently had. The worst part about it is that nobody seemed to be surprised when we shared with them that the average response was consecutively a 6. 

As we continued our short survey of questions, we were able to learn more about how our fellow UD students are generally doing and their awareness of various health services that are available to them on campus. Many of the people we interviewed either didn’t know much about the services offered or were deterred from using these services due to learning of negative experiences from friends. No one we spoke to had any meaningful experiences with the therapy services at UD and those that said they would look into it weren’t very enthusiastic. One student said she “would rather go home and cry in bed” than seek help from the daunting offices up the exposed stairs in Perkins Student Center. The lack of knowledge about certain health services that could be of use to students shows what the university is choosing to emphasize over other aspects of the university. Additionally, it seems as though that students are normalizing high workloads and allowing it to affect their mental health. Would a greater awareness for counseling and health services and an effort to normalize them improve students’ overall mental health from simply feeling “content at best” on a daily basis?

College, from the intense transition to simply attempting to maintain a certain grade point average and balancing a social life with extracurricular activities, applies an immense amount of pressure on the typical student, regardless of their specific studies. Such pressures can impact students’ mental health variably. An example of a very negative impact is from a current freshman, who recently had an “anxiety attack from the amount of homework [he] had to complete.” This may not be the case for everyone, as there are those who can handle different levels of work with more ease, but school should emphasize a desire to learn, not instill anxiety and nerves to complete an insane level of work. If these demanding workloads were slightly diminished along with increasing awareness for various health services, students at UD just might feel better than “mediocre”.