WPI Journal - The Magazine for WPI Alumni

SPRING 2014

The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)

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Spring 2014 39 friends in the hood COLLEGE IS A STRESSFUL TIME FOR MANY STUDENTS, WHICH IS WHY WPI'S PIONEERING STUDENT SUPPORT NETWORK HAS BEEN WIDELY EMULATED BY OTHER UNIVERSITIES— AND FOR GOOD REASON. IT WORKS. by Clayton Stromberger PHOTOGRAPHY BY JARROD MCCABE T WAS EARLY IN C-TERM—when you have to climb over snow banks to get to class and it's dark an hour before dinnertime—and WPI freshman Kristen Elizabeth Schleier was sinking. ¶ "I hit the wall," recalls Schleier, now a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. "I was over the honeymoon phase with college and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, now I have to be an adult. I have to do my own laundry, I have to make decisions about jobs on my own, I have to somehow budget my money and not be poor….' And class diffculty ratchets up a little bit in C-Term, because you're getting into the real engineering courses. So I just became really, really overwhelmed." ¶ Schleier began sleeping late and missing classes. She picked at her food during mealtime. In something of a fog, she fgured no one had noticed her new WPI survival plan to squeak by on C's. ¶ She was wrong. A few weeks later, two upperclassmen she knew approached her. ¶ "They said, 'Hey, you should talk to someone, because you're not doing so well, you haven't been to class in two weeks, you're getting bad grades, and we don't want to see you like this because we know you have so much more potential in you,'" remembers Schleier. WPI_spring14_features1.indd 39 3/9/14 12:12 PM

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