College helps students cope with mid-semester stress
Long Night Against Procrastination offers variety of resources for students
To help prevent any students falling behind from consistent procrastination, the Lethbridge College Learning Café, Buchanan Library and Students' Association have teamed up to push students through the stress.
Every semester for the last two years, the college has hosted a Long Night Against Procrastination where students are able to access a wide variety of resources and activities to help get them on a better path to get through the stress of studies. Around 200 students attend each event to receive help in different ways.
“The Long Night Against Procrastination is an international event that happens whenever the institutions decide they are going to host it," said Diane Fjordbotten, Learning Café co-ordinator, Tuesday night. “We chose the week before reading break because we find that this time students are really starting to feel the stress of lots of assignments and pressure for getting everything done before their break. We are hoping to provide them with some tools for dealing with that stress and for managing procrastination and just to help students out as they are working to be successful in their education.”
Throughout the evening, students are able to take in workshops on time management and procrastination, mini massages, doggy de-stress event, an opportunity to speak with Indigenous Elders, writing and research support, and an opportunity to make stress balls. Students are also provided snacks and free pizza throughout the night to help motivate them.
Alberta Health Services was offering information on healthy eating and wellness for individuals, where instructors opened their office doors after hours to assist students, and one instructor dedicated their time to have an assignment clarification station. The program is funded through the Alberta Advanced Education Post-secondary Student Mental Health Grant, but organizers say the event will soon be a regular program supported by the college.
“We have a wide variety of activities all designed to help students to get through the stress so they can get all the way to reading break and ideally get a jump on their assignments so they can relax a bit over the break,” says Fjordbotten. “We applied for the grant, but after this we decided that we are going to be putting it into our department budgets because we feel that it is something that is worth continuing and that we have other ideas for the grant funding so we would like to keep it going.”
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