Thursday, Jul 18, 2013, 10:20 IST | Agency: DNA
Around 800 new students admitted in various B Tech courses this year in IIT Bombay will undergo a comprehensive counselling programme within a week of joining. The Institute has chalked out a half-day workshop on “Preventive Mental Health” to be conducted by end of July and which is mandatory for all students to attend.
The workshop aims to boost students’ “mental and emotional well-being”.
Students will learn how to tackle homesickness, deals with hostel conflicts and take on the academic pressure that comes with a robust curriculum. A panel of experts from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and other institutes has been invited to conduct the workshop. The new academic year starts on Thursday.
Most first year students are teenagers. As all the IIT courses in are essentially residential, all of them will be staying in hostels which might be a new experience to most of them.
Prof Urjit Yajnik, dean of students affair, told dna, “We have permanent counselling at the campus for students. This year we decided to start off with a comprehensive session also, so that students know better how to deal with situations before they become too complex or get out of hand.”
The workshop will also be attended by senior students who play the role of the “mentor” to new students. IITs had started a mentor programme a couple of years ago to support first year students.
According to a professor, several first year students need counselling during the course for various reasons including homesickness, academic pressure and conflicts that come with shared hostel rooms. “Senior students have a different set of emotional problems altogether, which includes relationship and career issues,” he added.
Shivani Manchanda, counsellor at IIT B who is finalising the finer details of the preventive mental health session, says, “Loneliness and homesickness is what a new student feels once he/she joins. On the other hand, for some students from a rural background it’s a cultural shock to shift from a vernacular medium curriculum to an English curriculum. At the same time, they have to adjust with roommates and also handle academic pressure.”
This workshop aims to address all those issues and the students will be told to approach counsellor if they can’t handle any emotional situation. Several cases of suicide have been reported in IITs in the past, which alerted the authorities, forcing them to establish counselling centres in the campus.
The workshop aims to boost students’ “mental and emotional well-being”.
Students will learn how to tackle homesickness, deals with hostel conflicts and take on the academic pressure that comes with a robust curriculum. A panel of experts from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and other institutes has been invited to conduct the workshop. The new academic year starts on Thursday.
Most first year students are teenagers. As all the IIT courses in are essentially residential, all of them will be staying in hostels which might be a new experience to most of them.
Prof Urjit Yajnik, dean of students affair, told dna, “We have permanent counselling at the campus for students. This year we decided to start off with a comprehensive session also, so that students know better how to deal with situations before they become too complex or get out of hand.”
The workshop will also be attended by senior students who play the role of the “mentor” to new students. IITs had started a mentor programme a couple of years ago to support first year students.
According to a professor, several first year students need counselling during the course for various reasons including homesickness, academic pressure and conflicts that come with shared hostel rooms. “Senior students have a different set of emotional problems altogether, which includes relationship and career issues,” he added.
Shivani Manchanda, counsellor at IIT B who is finalising the finer details of the preventive mental health session, says, “Loneliness and homesickness is what a new student feels once he/she joins. On the other hand, for some students from a rural background it’s a cultural shock to shift from a vernacular medium curriculum to an English curriculum. At the same time, they have to adjust with roommates and also handle academic pressure.”
This workshop aims to address all those issues and the students will be told to approach counsellor if they can’t handle any emotional situation. Several cases of suicide have been reported in IITs in the past, which alerted the authorities, forcing them to establish counselling centres in the campus.
