Advertising Group – Winter 2024

CMST&230 Small Group Communication, Green River College

Group Members: Mia, Gabby, Vicca, Sera, Ezmael, Alex, Gurmaan. 

Problem Identification

The large problem we decided to take on was college students having negative feelings. These feelings are especially related to college, coming to campus/class, and just in their everyday interactions with the world. Getting students to be mentally healthy should be a top priority as poor mental health can greatly affect a student’s future. School should be a positive and uplifting environment, not one that students dread to go to every day. With that said, when a student has a negative mindset at school, it can affect the other students as well, this can create a ripple effect and bring down the whole campus morale.

Problem Analysis

As students ourselves, we realize that many students experience negative emotions related to their academics. A study in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry examined the amount of college students who experience depression, finding that 4 out of 25 students have anxiety or depression. Another article discussed school-based emotional crises, (Bohenkamp, J.H. et al) confirming that academic institutions struggle to find solutions for students’ mental health crises. Our survey further confirmed this. We asked students across Green River if they suffer from stress and low morale, and how it affects them. This revealed that out of 170 students, over 42% reported feeling down during/about school. Our survey also showed that only 7% of students feel motivated. The majority of students reported feeling “Meh” or simply “OK” about school. This illustrates the problem students face.     

Solution Criteria

The Small Win should be a complex task that requires more than 1 person to accomplish (a basic definition of the purpose of a group), that can be accomplished within the timeline of 4 weeks, and that involves all members of the group in the Small Wins solution. In addition, it needs to be consistent with the college’s guidelines for the safety and security of our students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Please keep this in mind as you develop ideas.

Solution Suggestions

For this project, many options for solutions were suggested and considered. Our main idea is that we wanted to make people’s days on the Green River campus and hopefully change their day for the better. The suggestions that we were considering were handing out notes, giving people compliments, using a QR code to understand people’s emotions, and/or a survey on how people were feeling. We ended up combining all of these and made a survey to understand people’s emotions and provided it to them in a QR code form before doing the community service part of the project itself. 

Solution Evaluation and Selection

After considering multiple solutions, our group decided to distribute nice notes to Green River College students in the Student Union building and Salish Hall building to boost their morale. We chose a method for each person to write 15 handwritten notes the day before we begin handing them out, one example of the note would be “Have a wonderful day.” Our group chose to use this method because sharing positive affirmations is the best way to brighten their day. Giving out supportive notes gives off our personal touch, and simplicity and also a direct impact towards them. This approach is simple, yet effective as not only does it require minimal resources, it conveys a sense of personal connection and appreciation which we believe will significantly uplift their spirits. 

Solution Implementation

The way we knew we obtained success was after seeing the huge smiles on these particular individuals who received our notes. Many of these individuals thanked us for giving them these notes either verbally telling us it made their day, while others showed different signs of appreciation with a smile, head nod, or fistbump. We knew we wouldn’t be able to give out notes to all the 170+ participants in our survey, but we did our best to provide the most possible kind notes to all students on the campus with the mentality of making their day and overall providing a happier morale to the Green River campus. 

Conclusions 

The group project was a great success with very few negative instances. The QR code survey and the encouraging note were a big hit during lunch hours when many students were free and wouldn’t mind filling out a short survey.  The very good side to all of this is that we were able to get 170 surveys filled out in only one lunch period! A huge positive point was that our group was cooperative and open to each other’s opinions and we were able to agree on the QR code survey, and the notes in a short period and we all executed the plan that same day! We were more successful when we came up to groups of students because we were able to get 4 to 8 surveys at once which helped out a huge deal while individual students were less time efficient but still were a big chunk of our survey percentage. As for the negative results or outcomes, the only ones I could notice would be the people who didn’t want to be disturbed or interacted with at lunch or simply were skeptical or overwhelmed about this survey which we had quite a few. Our group tackled this project well by building a strategy and resources to help us accomplish this project. We also had a great cooperative environment which helped us get this done quickly and effectively!

References 

Bohnenkamp, J. H., Schaeffer, C. M., Siegal, R., Beason, T., Smith-Millman, M., & Hoover, S. (2021). Impact of a School-Based, Multi-Tiered Emotional and Behavioral Health Crisis Intervention on School Safety and Discipline. Prevention Science: The Official Journal of the Society for Prevention Research, 22(4), 492–503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-020-01195-3

Eisenberg, D., Gollust, S. E., Golberstein, E., & Hefner, J. L. (2007). Prevalence and correlates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality among university students. The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 77(4), 534–542. https://doi.org/10.1037/0002-9432.77.4.534