Aiming to Solve the Mental Health Crisis for Students
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Aiming to Solve the Mental Health Crisis for Students 〰️
My freshman year of college, I took a course called Critical and Creative Thinking Using Information Technology. What I believed was going to be my worst class ended up being one of my favorites because it was the first exposure I had to the creation of a multi-level deliverable where I had to wear multiple different hats to ensure its completion and success.
Essentially, our letter grade is determined by a Community Research Proposal where we focus on solving an issue within Springfield. We can pick any topic of our choosing, and our group wanted to hone in on mental health since we all have suffered or know of someone who has suffered. We knew early on that we couldn’t provide a cookie cutter solution. We had to think of a dynamic and flexible method that could:
Work with any type of individual, no matter the background.
Targeted early on during development, as studies show most individuals begin to suffer from mental health in their early teens.
With this information in mind, we wanted to find a Social and Emotional Learning program that could easily be integrated within schools. Hours of research, coffee, and sitting in the library together led me and my team to RULER, a Yale initiative from their Center for Emotional Intelligence that aims to infuse the value of emotional intelligence into the curriculum. From there, we wrote up a 20 page proposal analyzing the pros and cons of this plan of action compared to other alternatives, developed distributable material, and made a PowerPoint to defend our case to the classroom.
In the end, our project was one of 20 that got sent over to our Center for Service Learning at Missouri State so that it could be evaluated for potential implementation in our First Year Foundations courses. And of course, we got an A+.
