Test Stress
December 15, 2010|People
In the last sleepless and stressed-out hours of the semester, when term papers come due and final exams loom, even the Serenity Room can get a little frantic.
The Serenity Room is a lilac-walled refuge inside the Wellness Center where students can find a few minutes of relief from deadline pressures and noisy roommates. These days it is totally booked.
“There’s a lot of anxiety and a little bit of panic at this time of year,” said Barbara Wittersheim, Elmhurst’s director of student health services. “Students come to us for help.”
In the Serenity Room, help often comes in the form of the fifteen-minute “mini-massage” offered by registered nurse and massage therapist Donna Kline. She began offering the massages to frazzled students 10 years ago, and they were an immediate hit. The demand grows every year. This semester, Kline filled 90 appointment slots over the last two weeks of the term. Elmhurst’s Student Government Association pays for the massages.
“I try to get them into a meditative state, so they can experience what it feels like to be relaxed,” Kline said after a full day of appointments. “Some of them are so stressed out, they need to know that there is something they can do to help themselves.”
For some students, a Kline massage has become as much a part of finals week as studying for exams.
“They tell me it really helps them focus,” she said.
The Serenity Room isn’t the only campus destination that attracts students as exams approach. The Frick Center extends its hours for late-night study. Hammerschmidt Chapel draws an occasional student in search of quiet or, just maybe, divine intercession for a particularly thorny exam. And the Buehler Library routinely fills to capacity with students rushing to complete papers or commit a term’s worth of class notes to memory. Others simply come looking for candy from the stash at the reference desk.
“They come in with their haggard looks,” said library director Susan Swords Steffen on a typically busy night during the last week of classes. “We’re here to help if they need a question answered, or even if they just need a paperclip for the paper they just finished.”
Then there are the parties. Residence halls are offering a full slate of game nights, yoga classes and snack breaks during finals week. Elmhurst president S. Alan Ray will help serve a late-night candelight breakfast in the cafeteria on December 14, the first night of finals. And Andrea Cladis, a senior and member of the Panhellenic Council, the governing body for the College’s sororities, is organizing a sequel to last year’s finals-week dessert party for stressed-out students needing a break from studying.
“The idea being that when you spell stressed backwards, you get desserts,” she explained. She wants this term’s event to be bigger and better, figuring that students need it more than ever. “This is a very challenging time for students.”
Wittersheim agrees. She says college seems to be getting more stressful for students, and more and more suffer from anxiety and depression. A dysfunctional economy only increases the pressure on students to succeed, she said. Some hold down multiple jobs and many push themselves to squeeze in as many classes and activities as they can.
“I hear them say, ‘I didn’t sleep well last night. I only got three hours and I usually sleep four.’” Wittersheim said. “It’s a juggling act.”
It’s enough to overwhelm any college student, but Kline says the few minutes of relief students find in the Serenity Room makes a difference.
“They’re learning to take care of themselves,” she said. “They come in with all kinds of stress, but the first thing I tell them is, ‘We’re leaving all that on the doorstep.’”
