“I’ve Never Needed Help Before …”
The question of the hour is not “Do I need help?” but “What kind of help do I need and where can I get it?” The typical freshman arrives on campus having managed high school well and largely without professional help, and as a result assumes it’s time to prove his independence by relying only on himself for the next four years. Then stress begins to pound away—deadline after deadline, decision after decision—until the pulls of campus life are enough to unhinge him. The result is often sleeping disorders, eating disorders, roommate conflicts, relationship issues, substance abuse, and personality dysfunctions.
Don’t panic. And don’t place your therapist on speed dial just yet. We’re merely saying that it is common for students to be unaware of the scale of the challenges confronting them in college, and many fail to take advantage of the extensive professional help that is available.
Everyone in college needs help. In many cases, that help can be provided informally by the wise peer, the sympathetic prof, or the alert RA. Help could be as easy as getting some advice on how to balance a tough course load, how to use search engines properly for research, or what not to wear to the Bare-All Ball at Halloween. Then again, you could take an unforgettable weekend course on study tactics that changes your college career. Or you may find you need some more structured help, such as personality or interest tests at the career center, or a session with a counselor to suggest strategies for managing stress or to provide a listening ear while your parents work through a rough patch. Alternatively, getting outside help could be less about you and more about learning how to support your roommate who may be fighting depression.
It comes back to getting the best out of the resources available to you. This sort of help comes once in a lifetime—for free, anyway—and it comes at a critical moment in your personal development. Since they’re part of the cover charge you pay as tuition for the next four years, you should get your money’s worth here as well.
Though it may be true that any help is better than no help, we’ve found that all too often students who get help get it too late. The dreaded F (or even dropping out) can usually be traced to an earlier denial of the need for timely help. Students who get help early rarely see their situation get worse. In fact, it’s so rare that, after over fifty combined years in the biz, we could probably name from memory the times that has happened. When in doubt, get help sooner rather than later. Crossing your fingers and hoping things will pan out works about as well as pixie dust.
It is common for students to be unaware of the scale of the challenges confronting them in college, and many fail to take advantage of the extensive professional help that is available. Everyone in college needs help.
Needing help takes a lot of different forms. Certainly, we could start off with flashier topics like depression or eating disorders, but those are fairly easy to spot. If you are in the midst of one of those scenarios, you probably know it and should get help immediately. What is harder to get a handle on is why you can’t seem to pass stats class even though you aced math in high school and you’re working your tail off. So let’s start with that one: feeling clueless.
What typically happens in the first week is that a student, such as Cassie, will feel a little confused and may not understand the material. The second week she is a little more distracted and confused, but she has a lot on her plate, so she doesn’t want to talk to the prof just yet. After all, the F-wave on the normal curve—which right now sounds like a lot of gibberish—might just start to make sense come Friday. Cassie doesn’t want to look like an idiot by needlessly running to the prof for help. This is college. It is supposed to be challenging. The third week comes, the fourth week goes, and Cassie decides she may as well hold on to see how the midterm pans out. Who knows, it could be that she’s being too hard on herself and that everyone feels just as lost, and so she will beat the curve (see, she does understand some statistics). Of course, it takes two weeks to get grades back since the class size is over a hundred students, so by the time Cassie gets her grade the semester is half over.
And it isn’t pretty. The midterm confirms that she Doesn’t Know What She’s Doing with a big D+. Strangely enough, even at this point a remarkable number of students in Cassie’s situation don’t ask for help. Cassie figures she’ll make it up on the next midterm, or she’ll encounter some magical elf who helps her ace the final. Of course, by this time she is fully engaged in the rest of collegiate life, so she has a whole lot of other pulls on her time. The futility of this exercise becomes apparent when she sits down to study a few days before her final and doesn’t even know where to begin. Desperate emails to the prof and TA ensue. We’ll spare you the crash ending, save to say that there is very little the prof can do at this point to bail her out. She’s in too far over her head. Had Cassie approached her prof during the second week of class, she could have arranged for a tutoring session or met with the TA or worked out some solutions with the prof during office hours. At least she would have been able to demonstrate to the prof that she cared and that she was trying diligently to improve her performance.
This same story can be retold for group projects that go awry or research papers that write themselves into a brick wall five pages away from the minimum requirement.
Most of the problems you are likely to face in college are easier to solve the sooner they are confronted. The earlier you seek help, the sooner you can go back to not needing it.
Whether or not you have proof that you’re flunking the class or flailing helplessly, if you are feeling stressed about the course, always approach the professor first. Sometimes he is part of the problem. We have known enough professors in our time to know that some have unrealistic expectations of how much their students can either manage or comprehend, so it’s best to provide at least one data point on his radar that says, “Hey, this isn’t working for me.” With enough data points, the prof might hopefully get the message. (We did know of one ogre who insisted on teaching grad-level stats to his first-year undergraduate statistics class. The fact that his office hours were bursting at the lintels with scads of confused and panicky students delighted him. He was one of those unusual sorts of academics who took a perverse pleasure in making others squirm in their ignorance—but this type is a rarity.) Of course, the shoe fits on the other foot, too. We’re assuming you’re keeping up your end of the bargain and at least cracking the book nightly before attempting to tell the professor that his expectations are unreasonable.
Most of the problems you are likely to face in college are easier to solve the sooner they are confronted. The earlier you seek help, the sooner you can go back to not needing it.
As a general rule, professors are in the business to educate, so they won’t be surprised if somewhere along the way to becoming smarter someone gets confused. That’s a natural part of learning. They won’t lose respect for the student who approaches them early feeling lost. Sometimes profs will suggest that the student come back in a week or two to see how he is managing the material. Despite what it may feel like, it isn’t a brush-off. The prof is most likely tracking the student’s progress and wants to give another week for the information to seep in.
Where a student is guaranteed a professorial brush-off is when the professor recommends he do A, B, and C and he doesn’t—and then comes back a week to six weeks later wanting the prof to spend one-on-one time explaining more.
In the unlikely case the student has done all that the professor asked but the professor still ignores her requests for help, the student should pursue other options. Out of frustration, she may want to focus all her energies on red flagging this prof to some academic council. While that would leave her with a feeling of satisfaction come the end of the semester, the time-sensitive prioritization is for her to focus on learning the material first and organizing a picket line later.
We know we mentioned this earlier in chapter 6, but it bears repeating: academic challenges can be exacerbated by personal challenges. If you have a personal emergency on your hands that will most likely last the semester and cause significant distraction, the time to tell the prof about it is now when she can help—not two days before the exam (unless, of course, the emergency occurs two days before the exam).
It’s true that profs can sometimes seem jaded about personal emergencies, so be prepared to overlook some rolling of the eyes or a huffed sigh or two if you begin the conversation with “I can’t turn in my paper because …” It’s a standard but true joke among profs that there is a rash of plagues that seem to strike students right around exam time. We knew one professor who had a student tell him that he was in the midst of a crisis and couldn’t focus on his work because his high school girlfriend had just dumped him. Fortunately for him, the prof felt empathy for the poor guy since at one point ages earlier he too had been dumped by a girlfriend and remembered it feeling like a cataclysmic disaster. Still, there were real limits to what the prof was going to do for him given the nature of the situation. The professor was able to work with him and his group-project colleagues (this was the real problem—it turned out the student was totally leeching off his group) to develop a solution to their group sharing problem, so this remained only a romantic disaster and not a romantic and an academic disaster. So don’t waive the possibility of getting help just because you think the prof won’t understand. He was young once, too.
It is an increasing phenomenon that students enroll with medical problems that warrant some special treatment within the classroom. It is so common, in fact, that there is an official procedure for getting a letter from the dean to the professors explaining the need and parameters for getting help. If you think your illness qualifies, be sure to get the letter at the start of the semester so your professors can alter assignments or exams; it doesn’t work so well as a “get out of jail free” card if you dawdle until finals week.
Most profs will honor this sort of alteration, but there will be a range of opinions on the matter. In the last few decades, many more students have been diagnosed with learning disabilities of all forms, and while there is debate about how much help students should receive, most professors tend to agree that some help is warranted.
It is critical to have this understanding settled as early in the semester as possible. If the prof is not amenable to assisting you and you don’t think you can make the class work without her help, take another class. Also, you should not use the letter to enroll in a class where your point of weakness is one that most students will be required to employ as their greatest strength. For example, if you are dyslexic, you may want to avoid taking Shakespeare: Every Play He Ever Wrote—in One Semester, since the prof will be less likely to cut you a break after being up front about the unique requirements of the course.
Too frequently students either obsess about their progress (or lack thereof) or ignore it; finding a balance is an art form. If you tend toward the panicky side of things, limit the frequency with which you dwell on the topic; of course, if you lean toward denial, you may need to devise a regular kick in the rear.
Either way, a good yardstick is to track your progress closely up until the second or third week of the course and then to speak with the professor if all is not well. Most minor kinks will have worked themselves out by that time, and if they haven’t, then there is good reason to look into it.
No man is an island, but some people sure try to fake it. Don’t be one of them. Admitting your shortcomings and seeking a solution are some of the surest signs of maturity out there. There is someone sitting at her desk right now waiting to help you, and you couldn’t give yourself (or her) a greater gift than to knock on her door.
The question is how to find that door. It may seem a little like hunting for the White Rabbit, so here are a few guides you can query for suggestions (no, one of them isn’t the Eat-Me box of doughnuts—sorry).
YOU KNOW YOU’RE IN TOO DEEP WHEN …
• You’ve stopped attending class because you “don’t get it anyway.”
• You treat every decision on campus as your most important decision.
• You believe every prof who tells you that his class is the most important one.
• You notice that you’re failing, but you keep doing what you were already doing (with a bit more intensity, perhaps) and actually expect a different result. This is a pretty good definition of insanity.
• You insist you don’t need help, even though it’s clear to those around you that you do.
• Whenever you are blue or stressed, you go home for the weekend to see Mom and Dad (as opposed to going home for the fun of it).
• You drink large quantities of alcohol on a regular basis, but believe you can quit anytime because you have quit lots of times.
It might seem that professors would have their fingers on the pulse of campus resources, but unless the problem is an academic one (and even then …), don’t be surprised if they don’t know where to send you. By all means, ask your professor for help if you think he might be able to point you in the right direction; just don’t give up if he grins goofily and tells you he’s never heard of that service being offered on campus. A good professor may turn out to have great life advice, but he was hired to be an expert in his subject matter first and foremost, and likely was given very little formal training on being a campus guide.
A better guide is your Residential Advisor (RA) or even your Resident Faculty (RF). RAs and RFs are specifically trained to make referrals, whether for personal issues or academic ones. If your need is most definitely an academic one, your Academic Advisor may be able to give some guidance as well.
Virtually every college has some level of counseling available to students, whether it be for something serious like having hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, or something less serious but still critical like managing stress or the blues. The most important thing for you to know—next to the point that this counseling is almost always free—is that anything you say during professional counseling is confidential. It’s so hush-hush that not even the faculty or the dean can find anything out. Unless you sign a waiver that you are willing to release your records, the counseling center can neither confirm nor deny whether you are even being seen by them. So please don’t let pride keep you from getting help.
It is extremely important to remember that even though you are on an academic campus, the resources available to you are not purely academic. When I came to college, I had a boyfriend. We tried the long-distance relationship but broke up after a couple months. It was a rough time for me and the effects could be seen in my schoolwork. Being away from my high school friends and family didn’t make it any easier. I wish I had known then that the counseling center could have helped me with this kind of personal issue.
Helen—sophomore, U of Chicago
If your challenge is big enough that it requires help across two or three offices on campus (such as mediation with your professor plus counseling), the dean of students will be the person to coordinate that. In most cases, you can even speak with an administrator and invoke this level of confidentiality, though be forewarned that if you speak with an administrator about issues involving harassment by anyone on the faculty or about incidents of sexual misconduct involving you or any other student, he is required to act upon that information. You are welcome to discuss as many hypothetical situations as you like, but he is legally bound to involve the appropriate people should he learn of any alleged misbehavior going on in the faculty or the administration. So should you or someone you know need to discuss this sort of situation without automatically launching it into a legal issue, you may want to set up an appointment at the counseling center since your counselor will still be able to fall back on client-counselor privilege.
While it’s better to use the confidentiality as a crutch if you aren’t willing to seek help otherwise, the best scenario is to find help and to free those professionals to talk with other key people in your life. Confidentiality, though well intended, can sometimes keep information from the people who are best positioned to help—like professors—or those who could at least keep the situation from being exacerbated.
Shock of all shocks, one newly minted freshman began the fall of her college career by learning she had a heart condition that required surgery. Becky had otherwise been a healthy, active individual, so this came as quite the surprise. Not knowing there were campus services available to help, she spent the remainder of the semester in a pharmaceutically induced fog (required to keep her heart rate down) that made walking across campus, not to mention late nights of studying, difficult. What she should have done was talk to her AA, RA, professors, or dean about her health situation, but she was one of those independent sorts who figured she could just take care of it herself. At least she had the common sense to notify her professors in January that she would be undergoing heart surgery and would be missing a few days of class.
What came as an almost greater shock to Becky than her diagnosis was when one of her professors claimed that her surgery was an inappropriate reason to falter in class and that it was in her best interest to return to class within the next week. Out came the tears. Becky was appalled, exhausted, and frustrated, so she went to her RA to explain the situation, more out of need for a listening ear than looking for a solution. (She still didn’t see the need to ask for help.) He connected the dots for her, and in less than a day Becky met with a dean who provided support for the remainder of her recuperation, handling whatever communications with professors were necessary to keep them abreast of her recovery and to ease her back into her course work.
Admittedly, it would have been a whole lot simpler if she had gone to the RA in the first place—back when she noticed she was falling behind in class. This is not to condemn Becky—she’s a good friend of ours and this is nothing she wouldn’t say herself. In fact, she’s kicking herself right now that her self-reliance cost her as much as it did in her GPA since she didn’t ask for any extensions or leeway that first semester. You don’t need to be diagnosed with a congenital heart condition to ask for help; any genuine challenge that may affect your college career is worth asking about. Take Becky’s word for it.
Since it bears repeating, let us say it again: you don’t need to be ill to get help. The writing center might have a Saturday session that takes you to the next level in your essay-writing abilities. The career center offers various tests (Myers-Briggs, for example) that may help you understand yourself and your strengths and interests better. Then there’s a whole range of help available for goal setting. Thinking of a career as a lawyer? Talk to a law school dean. It is a sign of mental fortitude and an indication that you are working through the system appropriately to ask for this kind of help. Anne was startled to discover one of the smartest students in her class at Stanford was actually taking a speed-reading course so he could work through literature faster than he already did. His forethought was a sign of just how smart he was.
On this note, one graduate bemoans, “I didn’t know there were courses on writing research papers or study skills at my university until the end of my freshman year. I’m sure it had been advertised on one of the DOZENS of colored flyers I received during orientation—it was just too much to process in the beginning and I forgot about it. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I wish I had sat down with my RA as well as my advisor during the first couple of weeks of college life and asked for the lowdown on all the extras so I could have taken advantage of them.” Us too.
I never needed much help academically in high school or in college, so I lacked familiarity with campus resources; consequently, when it came to finding and applying for an internship I found myself in uncharted territory. The feeling that I was not in control stressed me out until a close friend turned me on to the career center. The staff there were amazing! They helped me with my resume and cover letter and even walked me through a mock interview. I felt so much more prepared because of their help, and learned invaluable tips that were essential in procuring the best internship possible.
Lauren—sophomore, Northeastern U
The final word on getting help is that if you are going to rely on your informal network of friends (as most students do), be sure you get help from people you trust. The most challenging of trials can cause a person to lack judgment or behave desperately, so choose your loyal listener carefully and with discretion.
Early on, students look solely to their peers for help—and some of the best support does come from them—but it’s often difficult for peers to handle delicate information properly. It’s not that their judgment won’t be sound, though that should also be a consideration, but that they may not know how to handle the information confidentially. It only takes one sentence and your secret is out.
If the stressor is one you’d like to keep secret, be discreet until you know a person well (say, at least a year) and you’ve had a chance to hear how well he handles other people’s private information.
We mentioned earlier that profs aren’t professional counselors, but that’s not to say that you shouldn’t tell a prof generally about what’s going on behind the scenes. Admittedly it does change the way she thinks about the student, but that is a welcome improvement over her perception of a student who clearly needs help but seems too proud or lazy to seek it out. Of course, this is also much better than believing a student is simply an academic slacker when there really is an underlying problem. You sacrifice something when you acknowledge a problem, but you sacrifice far more if you try to hide it and hide it poorly.
A possible way to salvage your pride is to include a success plan in the conversation. When sitting down privately with your professor to discuss your entanglements, show him you are doing your best to work free of the issue by mentioning some personal boundaries or deadlines or goals you are working toward. There’s no need to go into great detail about your troubles, but you will want to outline the solution as a way of earning your prof’s trust.
To be more specific, if you struggle with any and all sorts of organization and feel lucky to have found a pair of matching socks to wear today, tell him that you have an appointment with an academic counselor to design a more efficient work plan so that you will be able to stay on top of your assignments in class. Or if you are burdened by a personal tragedy that is so weighty it makes course work seem irrelevant, explain that you have backed out of a course to ease your load and are seeking counseling to prove you are giving your all to succeed in class despite the chaos. By making your perseverance clear, they will most likely be happy to lend support.
Since your best bet is to catch a need when it is still small, here are a few sanity-check questions to ask yourself.
Most problems that show up in college could be anticipated before college. If you had a problem in some area when you were in high school, chances are the stressors of college, and your underdeveloped support network on campus, will only magnify it. As we’ve shown in this chapter, support of some kind is certainly present on campus; it just requires more initiative on your part to get it.
On a preventative health note, many student health services across the country include an annual physical exam for men and women as part of their campus health-service fee. It’s a pretty great service, and taking advantage of it will be the start of a great habit. You may also want to take advantage of various health education classes offered on campus—don’t worry, they will probably be much more practical than the ones you took in high school. These classes show how health today will impact your quality of life down the road with topics on nutrition, sexual lifestyle, exercise, stress reduction, and supporting family members with chronic conditions.
Another service you should take full advantage of is the opportunity to build a portfolio at the career center or in the prelaw, premed, or prebusiness advisor’s office. The portfolio is simply a file about you that is kept at the career center and filled with letters of recommendation and other evaluative information that can be sent to prospective employers or graduate schools. Once established, most colleges will keep records of this portfolio until you request otherwise. Copies of relevant test scores, letters of recommendation, and career searches will all be kept on file for you. Whether you plan on being employed immediately after college or not, it’s best to beat the rush and get your file started early.
As we mentioned in chapter 7, by a certain point in the year it is not uncommon for a college to have completely run out of tutors. That means you’re on your own if you wait until it’s too late. It’s a bit difficult to step over the ego and ask for help, but we’ve found that once students do, it becomes a habit, and they get their friends to sign up as well.
A final (and quite successful) measure of help would be to find a mentor on campus who will help you strategize and anticipate your next few steps. A mentor doesn’t need to be a hero, so it’s not as though by choosing this person you’re saying you want to become them. At the same time, try to choose someone you can identify with and respect, someone you click with personality-wise who can provide some support or help. It may be a professor, a coach, an administrator, or staff.
Everyone is busy and not everyone will be willing to be a mentor. The best thing to do is to ask the person up front to mentor you in a specific area, whatever that may be—carving a path through your major, providing some accountability in the party scene, helping guide you in some career or relationship decisions. That way, the person knows what’s required of her and whether or not she can accept your offer. Better yet, aim to build a team of mentors, since it is rare that one individual has expertise in all areas, let alone the time.
Even if the sun is shining, life is smooth, and you are happy and confident, the best thing you can do to ensure the happy days will continue is to schedule an appointment in a campus resource center a few times each semester. We get our teeth cleaned, have our tires rotated, and take vitamins all on a regular basis—why not add campus help to that list?
Having a mentor is really important. It helps to have someone who has your best interests at heart, is looking out for you, and is available when you need to talk things out. I had the good fortune of meeting a fellow Nigerian who was a junior when I was a freshman. Although we were in different majors, I admired how she had her priorities straight and knew where she wanted to be even though she hadn’t quite figured out how to get there. I went to her whenever I had troubles with classes, friends, or extracurriculars, and she always had a wise word or two. Now she’s in a master’s program in Harvard and I am mentoring a freshman who reminds me of myself two years ago.
Onome—junior, Stanford U
You aren’t alone. Just because you don’t understand everything on the first day doesn’t mean that the admissions office has made a terrible mistake. In case someone hasn’t already told you, that’s a standard fear of college students. In fact, it’s nearly universal, much like the dream about a class presentation in eighth grade on the day you forgot to wear your pants. Just because everything isn’t immediately clear on the first day or even in the first week doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here.
Admissions boards send out their thrilling acceptance letters based on the assumption that if students take advantage of the help provided on campus, they have the capability to thrive.
But college life isn’t all about academics, now, is it? If you’re feeling lonely or homesick, give yourself a break. Anyone who says they haven’t been homesick is lying. Not all students leave a home that is supportive or nurturing, and most students actually come to college looking forward to leaving something behind. Even those students are homesick for something. The longing tends to wear off after the first semester once you’ve got some routines in place and feel more settled. If not, you know what to do.
No matter how much wisdom we may chuck your way, and no matter how much of it you actually swallow, some days in college are just bad days. It’s pouring rain, you have no umbrella, you miss the bus, your computer crashes, you run out of money and can’t buy lunch, and the girl said no. DON’T FREAK OUT. Just because you hit a rough patch of a few hours, days, or even a few weeks doesn’t mean it will continue for the rest of your (what seems to be miserable) existence. Since your dad isn’t here to say it, let us be the ones to hand you a mug of steaming sunshine and remind you to take one day at a time.
It seems that my university hosts just as many “resume-help fairs” as the cafeteria hosts lunches. For years all of the tents and tables set up on the student walkways seemed less of an attraction than an obstacle to me. At least that was the case until I graduated and applied for my first big-girl job and needed—wouldn’t you know it—a polished resume. As I stared blankly at the screen, I wondered what I really needed to include on that list of personal accolades, I wondered what potential employers were looking for, and, mostly, I wondered why I did not attend one of those “resume-help fairs.” Oops.
Rebecca—recent grad, Point Loma Nazarene U