Lab Rat

or a guinea pig, well some sort of test animal. As part of my therapy I had to go over to the student life building at NIU for counseling. They make you fill out this form and which test to see if your depressed or suicidal or have anxiety issues, must be a lot of that going around campus, because thats all the form was looking for. Once thats all done they have you meet with a preliminary advisor/counselor who goes over the paper work to see whats bothering you, and ask you all sorts of questions. She sits there and says "uh huh, oh, I can imagine, that must be difficult" in a very calm and careing voice, but to me it almost seemed standard counseling talk when talking about deep issues, just a little fake. Anyways I'm not a "high risk" and since I'm already doped up I have to wait several weeks to see anyone, because apparently there are more needy kids in front of me. Thats Ok the tough part was making myself go to this place.

So today I got a call back from the nice lady that talked to me and she had gone out of her way to set me up with some Dr over in the Psych building to be apart of some experimental program that deals specifically with my type of anxiety disorder, or they think I would be a good candidate for it. I guess the program has already started or is about to start but they are anxious to get me in to be evaluated. God bless college, never a shortage of potential case studys walking about.

Group Project More like My Project

Ok I knew this was going to happen when I got placed in this group. At first I was pretty optimistic about theses girls, they all seemed pretty intelligent and like a decent bunch that wanted to work hard and get good grades. WRONG! I thought I was going to be the one to sit back and let them do all the work. WRONG! I knew this wasn't boding well for me when we all got out first exam scores back and the rest of my group had an average score of 60 out of 100. I managed to score an 86 which I am mad at myself for. I know what your saying 86 doesn't sound so bad, I just made some foolish errors in judgement on some of the test questions, should have been an A. Anyways back to the think tank. They suck and they have bad attitudes, thank God for my calming drugs because these bobble heads made me want to scream. First off two of my fellow group members couldn't get together with us for some unknown reason, which left me with two other members which I thought would be adequate input to write a paper. WRONG! Not only were they pretty much useless in the process and hindering and critiqueing my use of "big words", they didn't even do any research which drove me nuts, because I was sending emails all week reminding them to research the shit out of our topic. Thank god I was responsible and did as much research as possible, its actually kind of fun now. Anyways so there we all sat in the computer lab in the NIU library, which sucks, and they were both staring at me with blank expressions on their faces, like oh my God what are we all going to do. Thank God for them they had me in their corner and I started pounding away at the keys. I think what I came up with isn't that bad no thanks to the minimal input of my cohorts. I would say its at least a C papper, its definately lacking in the length department and I am sure from reading it you will be able to tell I was really stretching to make it longer. It just frustrates me to no end knowing that I am going to be carrying these people for this project which is obvious by there commitment to their studys and this class. I am really dissapointed on this one, because I think a really good argument could have been made if only there was a little more time.

The biggest challenge facing college students in their college career is staying focused wile studying. One of the most prevailing distractions to studying is TV viewer- ship. In a recent Nielson media research report, it concluded that the average college student watches 3 hours and 41 minutes of television each day (M. Bauerlein). A study from Arkansas state found that students spend as much as 13 hours a week studying, but nearly that much-12 hours was a week was spent watching TV (“Students Study More” 2005) It has been proven that watching television “leads to mental laziness” (N. Shin) Mental laziness can lead to “disaffection of students from their course work and punny reserves of knowledge they bring into the classroom” (M Bauerlein).
In order to help combat the growing dilemma of students distracted from there academic studies by television our team goal is to educate 30 NIU students between the ages of 18-25. We are attempting to change their current TV viewing behavior and get them to focus their time more effectively on studying their course material. We chose to change the TV viewing behavior of college students over changing their attitudes about the issue for the reason that attitude does not always have enough impact to change a behavior. Festinger’s minimal justification hypothesis suggests that changing the behavior of the students will eventually change their attitude about viewing television instead of studying, which will be more effective in the long-term (E. Griffin). We are not reinforcing the TV viewing behavior because that would be counterproductive to the exact behavior we are trying to destabilize and change with our campaign.
In order to improve academic performance among college students, it is imperative that we get our message across to the students of Northern Illinois University. Watching TV takes time away from intellectually demanding activities such as doing homework. Our campaign is valid because we are attempting to minimize “a low level of mental effort that is elicited by television viewing… this propensity for mental laziness or passive-cognitive functioning can be considered to be a result of watching television, which may hinder academic achievement that requires more active intellectual efforts” (N. Shin). The importance of this campaign is to inform students about the negative distractive effects of TV viewing behavior and to ultimately change that behavior in order to achieve a higher discipline within their studies.
The target audience for this project is students of Northern Illinois University between the ages of 18-25. These students will be surveyed in Neptune, Stevenson and DuSable. Students will be both male and female and ranging throughout all levels of college education. Our justification for choosing this target audience is according to Northern Illinois University demographics, the average undergraduate student age as of fall 2005 is 22, and the female student body population is 45.8% followed by male student body population of 54.2% (NIU Facts). We believe this method will expose a random sample of the student population to our campaign. Students with limited studying distractions such as TV viewing behaviors perform better, but those that are easily distracted to the temptations of television should be more receptive to our behavioral campaign. Our target audience needs to be made aware of the detrimental effects television has on student academia.