Shifting Through the Paper Jungle: College Applications and the Mental Affect

• In Event: Oral History as a Platform for Student Advocacy and Social Justice

Abstract

Abstract

People not only want to better their life for themselves, but they want to better it for one day when they have a family. That’s why college can have such a positive impact on people’s lives while having a negative impact on people’s mental health. This project will show how mental health affects students in high school applying for college and students that are in their first year of college. The significance of this project would be that it gives people a look on the college selection process and the first year of college can affect your mental health. This study also seeks to show how students can better prepare themselves for the tasks that lie ahead. During this project, participants will share their experiences. Within the Sierra and Harrison D2 community all the parents would love to see the students go to college, but they may not be aware of the impact on their student’s mental health from applying to college, a potential rabbit hole for the ill prepared.

Proposal

For some people applying for college can be a walk in the park, but applying isn’t the issue. How one is going to pay for everything may be a recurring question that comes to mind. Even though college may have difficult work, sleepless nights, constant studying, and money problems, people continue to want to better themselves by achieving a college education. In a world where the expectation of attending college is debatable, the stresses of getting accepted, or even recognizing the difficulties that lay ahead for a high school junior or senior, leads many to give up on the process or apply to a college or university that may not have been their favored choice. This presentation will show the psychological effects applying for college has on not only members of the Sierra High School community, but the teen population as a whole. The significance of this project its impact to provide potential safeguards and road maps for the entire upperclassmen population in public and private school institutions due to the majority of them coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This project will all show not only students, but also parents and those individuals who think the process is easy, that in fact, the pressures put on teens are stressful and can hold long term effects.

Lastly, this presentation will share the process involved for finding participants and conducting interviews. The interviews were conducted and then transcribed with a multi editing process that occurred to reach minimal error. As a result, in addition to the research questions being answered, there are also video interviews that were conducted which will also be preserved in an archive. It is the hope to store these final results via an archival file at Sierra High School.

Authors

• Aaron J. Griffen, Texas A&M University

• Melinda Maulucci, Sierra High School

• Gwen Johnson, Sierra High School