Rice ranked 22nd most stressful college

By Seth Brown     4/15/10 7:00pm

Schiller probably didn't have stress in mind when he wrote his "Ode to Joy," but for many Rice students, some degree of stress apparently means happiness. On April 4, The Daily Beast, an aggregated news Web site, ranked Rice the 22nd most stressful college in the nation, yet the fourth happiest. Michael Winters, director of the Rice Counseling Center, said he was skeptical of the criteria used to create the rankings.

"A lot of the methodology is really just kind of odd," Winters said. "It would be a lot better if they surveyed a sample of students [at each institution]."

The Counseling Center sees about 10 percent of the student body each year, Winters said, but he said that this did not necessarily mean that the other 90 percent is happy, or that the 10 percent who seek counseling are unhappy.

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Stress at Rice is often a problem of selection more than of environment, Winters said.

"It's not necessarily about the professor giving too much work, but the student says 'I need to do this at a very high level,'" Winters said. "We have a very driven student body, and that leads to stress."

However, Winters said that not all of that stress is necessarily bad, and that some students - especially the type Rice recruits - thrive in a high-stress environment.

Wellness Center Director Emily Page said that the real concern is not stress, but rather distress.

"[Stress] becomes a bad thing when you reach the point of diminishing returns," Page said. "When you're so overwhelmed that productivity starts to wane, everybody sees their stress differently."

Page said that while the most obvious indicator of distress is that grades suffer, at Rice, this is often the last thing to happen. Students under distress often get sick frequently, have difficulty with relationships and have difficulty fulfilling their responsibilities in their extracurricular activities, Page said.

"The sooner you learn how to prioritize things in your life, the better off you will be," Page said. "Taking time to reflect on priorities is never a bad thing."

The Wellness Center also offers coaching sessions where students can set goals and are held accountable to them.

As far as dealing with stress, Winters said that psychological studies have unequivocally shown the importance of both sleep and exercise. He also recommended devoting energy to having a good social network and aligning personal values and interests with the academic programs being pursued.

"The more people you feel connected with, the better," Winters said, noting that people with better developed social networks actually get fewer colds.

Besides the coaching sessions offered by the Wellness Center, both the Wellness Center and the Counseling Center offer a number of services to students who want help dealing with their stress. The Counseling Center has staff on call 24/7 for students who need immediate attention and offers several educational programs about identifying and aiding students who might engage in destructive behaviors, and the Wellness Center has meditative sessions for students and materials students can check out about dealing with stress.

Winters said that any recommendations students have for improving the Counseling Center's services would be welcome.

Despite the stresses of attending Rice, Wiess College sophomore Jiwon Jung and Brown College freshman Sandra Kim both agreed that the college system contributed significantly to Rice students' happiness.

"It does sound paradoxical, but if you think about it, the college system and all the events makes people belong to the school," Jung said.

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