Stress @ Cornell

A couple of weeks ago, I attended President Skorton's Open Forum, and brought up the point that, from his column in the Daily Sun, it seemed that Cornell was concentrating more on addressing the symptoms of stress rather than the causes. I made the case that if the school made more of an effort to identify and avoid the root causes of student stress, addressing the symptoms (e.g. suicidal thoughts) wouldn't be as necessary. He agreed with me on the point, but didn't say much about moving further with it.

However, after the forum ended, Vice President Susan Murphy approached me, agreed with my point, and said that we should meet to discuss it further. So a few days ago, I met with her, and had a very productive and enlightening discussion on what Cornell is doing to address the issue. As it turns out, there's a group on campus that has been doing a study on the very same topic, so she invited me to attend their presentation tomorrow night. Hopefully they'll have found some good ideas, and then we can all move forward together to improve the school.