Stress, Stress, and more Stress


I recently had the fortune of accompanying my good friends Lee Seltzer and Zach Smith on one of their Scarlet Honors Ambassador tours. The Honors tours are set up in the exact same way as regular tours - parents and prospective students ask questions to a panel of undergrad students and deans - except that it is targeted towards students interested in enrolling into the SAS Honors program. Much of the questions asked are similar to what are asked during a regular tour, questions such as how difficult is to navigate between the campuses, where are dining halls and recreational facilities located, typical things every soon-to-be first-year (as well as their parents) would like to know.

However, during this particular session, many of the questions asked had to do with the competitiveness of certain programs or majors. My buddies Zach and Lee tell me that this is pretty typical for an Honors tour (that is not to suggest that Honors students are any more studious than anyone else; the primary goal of each and every student is to receive a good education).  And maybe I am wrong in this regard, but it appeared to me as though every time these questions were asked, there was the tiniest trace of anxiety in the voice of the asker. These kids weren't even done with high school yet and already they were stressing out about their ranks and GPAs!

I found myself discussing in great length and in great detail the various academic resources available to Rutgers students. Horror stories from the infamous Expository Writing class had trickled down to many of these students, so I explained that there are weekly (free) writing tutoring sessions held specifically for improving Expos essays. I also explained how every campus has a tutoring center available to students (also for free) for areas ranging from the hard sciences to mathematics to foreign languages, and everything in between. I explained that the tutors are all fellow students that are majoring in whatever they are tutoring, and that they themselves have taken whatever classes they are tutoring, and that my good friend Jason was one of them!

My friend Jason (usually he doesn't wear the sombrero while tutoring)

I also described the ODASIS and LSAMP programs, as well as the fact that every professor has office hours where their job is to literally just sit in their offices and wait for students to come and ask them questions. Yet there was one very important resource available (freely!) to all students that I didn't get a chance to discuss, and I wish I had: CAPS. Probably the most underrated and underused program here at Rutgers, the CAPS program is designed to "help students reach and maintain a positive, productive university experience." Students can meet one-on-one or in groups with certified counselors to discuss anything and everything, including the stresses of a large academic workload. 

After the essentials - the dorms, the dining halls, gyms, classroom buildings - are all down, the next most important thing for incoming freshmen to be aware of is the large number of academic resources available to them (at absolutely no cost).