ProjectConnect aims to build community and foster connection between students on campus. Photo courtesy of Erica Weathers.
By Anoushka Kuswaha ’24
News Editor
Approximately half of all college students assessed in a National College Health Assessment study meet the criteria for loneliness, Erica Weathers, clinician and outreach coordinator at Mount Holyoke College’s Counseling Service, explained in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. Recognizing this data point, Weathers sought to find a way to alleviate an experience of chronic loneliness on the College’s campus. This search led her to ProjectConnect, a program created by the former associate director of the Counseling Center at Amherst College, Jessica Gifford. Through the program, students are organized into groups where they can socialize with others through thought-provoking questions, activities and trips to local restaurants, as per the weekly Word Out email sent on Oct. 9.
Weathers, along with Dade Scolardi, a post-graduate clinician at Counseling Service, has spearheaded the ProjectConnect program at Mount Holyoke.
The program is designed to last over the course of five weekly sessions, with participants divided into groups of four to six people and led by student leaders in their communities. At Mount Holyoke, that group of students includes peer health facilitators as well as students interested in a job that fosters connections with members of the community on a wider, more diverse level than currently available to students, as per peer facilitators of ProjectConnect Tracy Wen ’24 and Meghna Karmacharya’25 expressed in interviews with Mount Holyoke News.
ProjectConnect’s pilot session began the week of Oct. 17 and will run for five weeks. The Project has seen impressive sign-ups, with many students indicating an interest in participating in the program and the formation of a waitlist for the second session before the first session had even concluded, according to Weathers.
The Project was advertised using the College’s weekly Word Out emails and through posters displayed around campus, promoting the building of Mount Holyoke’s community and the fostering of deeper connections that could be gained through being a part of the program.
The desire to foster deeper connections on campus was mutual between both participants and their fellow student facilitators, “[It] can be very hard to build a stable community. … So I was looking to foster more of that,” Kyla Core ’24, one of the peer facilitators, explained in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. The need to establish a program like ProjectConnect was echoed by Weathers, who explained that at Counseling Services, she and her colleagues frequently meet students struggling with feelings of loneliness and a lack of belonging. Weathers explained that in light of this seemingly urgent need, which to her appeared to be exacerbated by the pandemic, a program like ProjectConnect could be “beneficial” for the wider community of the College in general. Furthermore, Weathers enthusiastically expressed how the program’s goals aligned with those of Be Well, one of the College’s primary wellness programs, stating that in order for there to be a healthy community on Mount Holyoke’s campus, all of the community members must feel a sense of belonging and connectedness to those around them.
“[It] can be very hard to build a stable community. … So I was looking to foster more of that.”
Weathers cited a NCHA statistic that reports that loneliness rates have been growing steadily over the past few years. For ProjectConnect’s student facilitators, building community and finding new connections was also a concern — not only for the students they were aiming to assist, but for themselves as well. The student facilitators experienced the realities of these statistics firsthand.
For Karmacharya, there was a particular surprise in the range of class years present in her assigned cohort, expressing that it was “[surprising] that most of my participants were not first-years. … There were juniors, there were sophomores and there was a first-year. I was surprised by the fact that people [who have] passed their first year still take the time to be a part of ProjectConnect.” Continuing on, she outlined that she had expected a larger number of first-year students, as “that’s when you expect people are looking for new friends and looking for the most support. But it goes to show that even people in their junior year need that support, and are still craving communities that they couldn’t [have] the past year because of [COVID-19].”
In other cases, the student facilitators found it particularly impactful to hear a group of people, more so their peers, state outright that they have been feeling lonely, in the case of Kore. Kore described the feeling of hearing her cohort members open up about their feelings surrounding friendship and connection on campus as “powerful.” Kore went on to observe how this initial display of vulnerability made it possible for others in the cohort to be vulnerable about their feelings as well, saying that this display of vulnerability marked the possibility of “having real conversations.”
Among the peer facilitators interviewed, there was also a shared sense that it is difficult to make connections with people across academic interests, and a renewed sense of optimism, that through this project, not only could they gain new perspectives, but also new friendships. Wen, a neuroscience major, joined ProjectConnect to have a job on campus that assisted her in both community relationships and getting some hands-on experience with her academic interests. She described her current situation as “barely [knowing] people from other majors or other class years, [but] through this program, I am [expecting] to know more friends who have different majors than I do.”
Weathers further hopes that the project can serve as a way to improve the College community’s overall mental health by giving students the resources to connect with themselves, then one another and hopefully the wider community. “Healthy community is one … where students are engaged,” she said. “One [where] they feel like they have solid relationships with other students, [and where] they feel a sense of purpose, meaning and belonging.”