Counseling Sessions and Tutoring Programs Can Help Depressed SNU Students

Every year many university students suffer from depression and about 300 students commit suicide. After the recent deaths of 4 students at KAIST, depression in university students is becoming a nationwide issue. The fact that most of the students who died were suffering from depression, raises concern over what is causing students' depression and whether there are effective solutions.

Students at Seoul National University are not an exception to depression. Students get depressed for many reasons such as schoolwork, financial problems, difficulties adjusting to college life, stressful relationships with new people and career challenges. According to counselors at the Center for Campus Life and Culture and the Gwanaksa Counseling Center, two representative counseling centers at SNU, the most influential cause for SNU students' depression is academic achievements falling short of self-expectations. Students often feel frustrated about not being able to do as well as they did in high school and guilty when facing their parents. Also, many students feel a greater sense of deprivation, meeting new friends from wealthy backgrounds. Many students express their feelings of helplessness on Snulife, an SNU online community site, often saying that they think a lot about committing suicide. However, in many cases students do not know where to get practical help and feel even more depressed trying to deal with these issues by themselves. In order to help students struggling with depression, SNU is offering various services where students can unburden themselves.

The Center for Campus Life and Culture has provided counseling sessions for students experiencing depression since 2001, as a means of providing professional guidance to help students lead a cheerful college life and develop self-confidence. The center, which is located on the fifth floor of the Student Hall (Building No.63) offers individual counseling sessions, phone call services and email services. Individual consultations are offered to anyone enrolled in SNU from 9am to 6pm every weekday. Students who need consultations can call 880-5501 to make a reservation and visit the center to get advice from a counselor. Phone call services are available for students who cannot attend individual counseling. SNU Call service (880-8080) is available 24 hours a day for anyone who wishes to receive counseling. In addition, counseling via email is also possible by sending an email to counsel@snu.ac.kr and counselor will reply within 24 hours. Consultations can be done in English, so foreign students are also free to use these services.

The dormitory also offers private counseling to students. The Gwanaksa Counseling Center, which is located on the first floor of Building No.919, is easily accessible for students who live in the dormitory. The center is open to Korean and foreign students who wish to have private counseling, from 7pm to 11pm every weekday. The Gwanaksa Counseling Center is especially convenient to foreign students, as many foreign students live in the dormitory. According to the Gwanaksa Counseling Centers, foreign students often feel depressed due to having to adjust to a new culture and ask for private consulting sessions.

SNU is making a much greater efforts to help students suffering from depression especially due to academic pressure by making sure tutoring programs are available to those in need of such support. The basic courses in calculus, physics, chemistry, biology and English are available for students who need more practice in these subjects. In addition, this semester the Faculty of Liberal Education started a peer-to-peer tutoring program for Korean and English. Upperclassmen who earned high grades in 'College Korean' and 'Advanced English' are selected as tutors, with two freshman students assigned to each tutor to receive help in following 'College Korean' or 'College English' classes.

Although the reasons for depression are personal and different for each individual, these services offered by SNU may provide some guidance to students feeling helpless. A counselor from the Gwanaksa Counseling Center said that students who go through the counseling sessions often say that the sessions help them gain an objective perspective about their problems and start building constructive solutions to overcome their problems. Through the utilization of such services offered by the school, students no longer need to feel alone in dealing with depression.

Written by JANG Eunju, SNU English Editor, ejjang1025@snu.ac.kr   ?
Proofread by Brett Johnson, SNU English Editor
Reviewed by Eli Park Sorensen, Professor of Liberal Studies