By: Javacia Harris Bowser
Keila Adams and Autumn Edwards can both still vividly remember the stress they grappled with in high school as they took on rigorous international baccalaureate (IB) coursework and college preparatory classes. Their experiences inspired the project they’ll take on for their Albert Schweitzer Fellowship year.
Autumn and Keila, both students in the Harrison School of Pharmacy at Auburn University, are developing a program on stress management for IB and early college students at Murphy High School in Mobile, Alabama. The lessons plans, which are rooted in the concepts of social and emotional learning, will cover topics such as self-care practices, time management skills, and healthy coping mechanisms. Social and emotional learning, or SEL, is an educational method that aims to foster self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. To measure the project’s impact, students will complete surveys before and after the program.
“I remember feeling like IB was everything to me and that if I didn’t graduate with my IB diploma, then I wouldn’t be successful,” Keila recalls. “I was always stressed out and didn’t really know how to cope or how to manage my stress. I wish there was someone or something like what we’re trying to do to teach me coping mechanisms and how to manage stress when I was an IB student.”
Born in Japan, Keila moved to the United States at age eight and grew up in Daphne, Alabama, where she attended Daphne High School. While in high school, Keila’s stress became so unmanageable that she began to suffer from panic attacks and severe stomachaches.
“I hope I can take that experience into this project and make even a small difference in a student’s life,” Keila says.
Autumn was also a part of her school’s IB program. Additionally, while she was a student at George County High School in Lucedale, Mississippi, she also was enrolled in an early college decision program through which she earned an associate’s degree while she was still a high schooler.
“Going through that time I was so stressed about the future and how to handle things,” Autumn shares. Despite already having a college degree under her belt, when Autumn enrolled in college full-time, she had a tough transition because of her stress levels.
So when Keila approached her with this project idea for the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, she was all in.
Furthermore, Autumn plans to pursue a career in teaching and believes working on this project will help prepare her for that role.
Keila believes pharmacists have a responsibility to teach even outside the classroom.
“Pharmacists can make a big impact by counseling and educating patients,” she says.
Though Autumn and Keila are in the early stages of their project, they’re already learning lessons from the process. Working with their site mentor has helped them realize that the stress students endure doesn’t just stem from school matters.
“I went into this thinking that school is the only stressor, but there are other things that can stress out a teenager like social media, Keila says. “So I really had to do my research on that.”
Additionally, Keila says, she had to keep in mind that young people dealing with a rigorous curriculum, the pressures of social media, and other stressors are doing so at a stage in life when they don’t yet have a strong sense of self.
“With teenagers, their brains are still developing and they’re trying to figure out their self-worth, their goals, their values, their identity,” she adds.
The project is teaching them patience too. Trying to coordinate their schedules with their site mentor’s schedule has been tough, especially since Keila spends her summers in Japan. But they’re pushing forward, nevertheless.
Autumn and Keila hope that after their fellowship project concludes the stress management program can still be implemented at Murphy High School by school counselors or teaching assistants.
While some may think that young people today are wrestling with mental health issues more than previous generations, Autumn believes that may not be the case. And though she recognizes that social media can be a stressor for students, she believes it can also be a source of help.
“It’s not necessarily that students and teenagers are struggling more with mental health, but they have the access to talk about it, and they have people to listen,” she says. “I don’t know if the numbers are more or less now, but I do definitely think they have the resources to say it out loud.”
Through social media, Autumn says, young people can share their struggles and learn about the struggles of other students, which can help them identify issues such as anxiety. Autumn’s hope, of course, is that this will also lead to more young people getting the help they need.
But Autumn and Keila aren’t leaving this to chance. Through their Albert Schweitzer Fellowship project, they are giving ambitious 10th and 11th grade students the stress management tools they wish they’d had as teens and doing their part to promote good mental health in students.
