Kean offers relief to stressed students
By: Maria Tutillo
Kean University’s Office of Intervention and Retention offered an Overcoming Anxiety Workshop last December in the Center for Academic Success Building to help students relieve stress throughout the semester. They plan to offer more workshops this Spring.
Overcoming anxiety workshops are mandatory for students who are under academic probation. Students are subjected to academic probation when their academic performance is not up to standards. Academic probation is removed from students after they attend all sessions of the workshops in that semester and after they have improved their grades.
Marbely Perez, a Montclair State University graduate and Kean University alumna Stefanie Perez worked together towards counseling and guiding attendees.
“We just try to help everyone who walks in here to walk out feeling a little better,” Stefanie Perez said. “We help them pick up their slack.”
However, anyone is invited to attend the workshops. You do not necessarily need to be under probation or be a Kean student. The only requirement is to be active and committed to participate.
“We just go with the flow,” said Marbely Perez. “We talk about whatever needs to be addressed to calm students down in anxious times so they don’t stress out more than they need to.”
During the session, several handouts where distributed which helped students measure how severe their anxiety was. The handouts also provided tips and advice on how to deal with excessive anxiety. One of the handouts, an anxiety questionnaire, was developed by Sherrie Nist-olejnik and William Diehl in 1990 to determine if a student experiences a mild or severe case of anxiety.
Stephanie Perez commented on how she retains her composure while she counseled five other people during one evening’s session.
“You can’t stress the little things because you’ll be stressed all the time” she said.
Students that attended the workshops noted they provided a much needed sense of belonging. They felt as though they had someone who understood them, acknowledged their troubles, and wanted to help them do better.
Besides the overcoming anxiety workshop, the office of intervention and retention also offers setting boundaries, time-management, note-taking, and managing stress workshops.
The workshops will still be ongoing for the spring semester as well. The schedule can be found in the CAS room 118. For more information, call (908)-737-0323.