Issue 28

Phone calls with her father lately were starting to leave Paige, a college junior in Texas, feeling stressed and confused. His questions about her grades had expanded to include concern about her progress on internships and jobs, with an undercurrent of tension about finances. She was starting to worry about…

When Laurie Burstein-Maxwell’s son Dan told her he felt like something was wrong, she understood why he seemed to be distancing from his friends. Before his depression, his mom said, the high school senior spent all his free time out and about in Radnor, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. In…

The Making Sense of Science column is a partnership with the University of Maryland School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral and Community Health, Center on Young Adult Health and Development. Stress during college is inevitable. College administrators, faced with unprecedented levels of student distress, sometimes feel pressure to take the…

Fighting uncertainty with information, student advocacy prevails, even in the states where reproductive rights have been most attacked. When Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMUCC) graduate student Cheyenne Sanchez was growing up in McAllen — the largest city Hidalgo County, Texas — students were not required to take any form of…

Alicia Floyd is still on the clock when she sits down to record. Leaning forward, she films herself from the shoulders up, dressed in a black scrub top, with the pale, empty walls of a hospital call room behind her. “Briefly,” she recounts, “my story is that I matriculated in…

In 2014, Dr. Judi Alperin King, PhD, founded the Boston area’s first organization dedicated to supporting students who would otherwise need to navigate college on their own: the Wily Network. Eight years later, Dr. King and her team work with 75 students, called Wily Scholars, across ten campuses. For their…

The pandemic got Sylvia Mahjabeen thinking about her education again. She had spent the last decade cycling through jobs, in industries like retail and fast food, and left her latest gig, packing for Amazon, when lockdown began. The longtime Queens resident from Bangladesh decided to give school another shot. Nearly…