Interview | Interview with In Sook Ahn, Expert Coordinator at SNU’s Center for Campus Life & Culture
24-08-29 15:17페이지 정보
작성자 관리자 작성일24-08-29 15:17 조회110회 댓글0건관련링크
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| Q1. |
It’s a pleasure to meet you. Can we start by talking about your field and main areas of interest?
Absolutely. As an expert coordinator, I’m responsible for overall management of the center’s work. I have a doctoral degree in counseling, and as for my specialties, for counseling recipients it is adult individual counseling and for theory it is object relations and Gestalt theory. I obtained my Level 1 counseling psychologist qualification in 2013, and started working at the Center for Campus Life & Culture in September of last year.
| Q2. |
Could you tell us a little about the center? And I’m curious about what your main duties as an expert coordinator are.
The Center for Campus Life & Culture provides individual counseling, psychological testing, and group counseling for undergraduate and graduate students at SNU. We offer group counseling on topics such as anxiety control, loss and personal growth, and interpersonal relationships, and a new group counseling program on healthy gaming habits is planned for this fall. There’s also a network development program that connects people through volunteer work, and a semester-long program for students who are on or are at risk of receiving academic probation. There’s also a program for students experiencing burnout, and one on a meditation-like practice called the Alexander Technique. Most importantly, we operates SNU Call, making ours the only university in Korea that provides 24-hour counseling services to those in suicidal or psychological crisis.
| Q3. |
What are the main difficulties that members of the SNU community report struggling with? I’m also curious whether any new issues have emerged in recent years.
Among the difficulties that SNU students bring to us that
are not crisis-level there are presentation anxiety, grades, assignments, and
problems with friends. Graduate students especially tend to seek counseling
when experiencing discomfort due to conflicts with other members of their lab
or with professors. In more serious cases, there are family problems. Some
students got into SNU through hard work in difficult environments, and some
have parents who divorced early or conflicts within the family. If these
problems persist, the students may require counseling while taking medication
prescribed by the Health Service Center for symptoms of depression and anxiety.
And I think there’s
a lot of burnout compared to other universities. There are quite a few students
who are used to being the best and then after experiencing failure for the
first time, the shock makes them want to stop trying, so they struggle with
procrastination. There are also many people having psychological difficulties after
COVID. Maybe it's because it was difficult to go through that time, but there
were a lot of serious crises last year, and I’ve heard that this year, serious
crises are occurring a lot among high school students.
| Q4. |
Most universities have only one counseling center at their central office, and not one at each college or school. SNU has many counseling organizations, and I feel that many students agree that meeting with a counselor is a good thing to do. They know that consulting with a professional means that confidentiality will be well maintained and they’ll get appropriate help. One of the things that SNU does well is crisis management. We have a 24-hour service to respond to emergency cases. We also provide a lot of suicide prevention training. We’ve conducted sessions 24 times in the past three years, about eight times a year, which is a high frequency. We also created and have been holding a loss/personal growth group to create a safe environment and community for processing loss experiences during the COVID-19 period, which I think is great.
| Q5. |
You’ve explained the things that the Center for Campus Life & Culture is doing well, but there must be some areas for improvement too, right?
In terms of areas for improvement, some institutions do not provide counseling if it has been fewer than three months since a suicide attempt. In fact, it’s difficult to provide counseling if the person does not promise to keep alive. In other countries, people who survive a suicide attempt may be forcibly hospitalized so that counseling can proceed safely—there’s a little more compulsion. In Korea, the person refuses in-patient treatment and their guardian refuses to have them hospitalized, but they say they would like to receive counseling. It’s difficult to request counseling in a situation where that promise [to keep alive] cannot be guaranteed.
In other countries, the ratio of students to counselors is about 400 to 1, but the ratio at SNU is not that low yet. Also, employment stability is important for counselors, but currently most of them are contract workers who can only work for two years. Similarly, the director and department heads are replaced when their term ends, so it would be good to have [dedicated] counseling faculty who can take responsibility and run the organizations stably over the long-term. I also think we need the budget and policies to make part-time freelance counselors into full-time workers.
| Q6. |
I understand that the Center for Campus Life & Culture has established a cooperative system with and is assisting the other organizations through bodies such as a council of counseling-related organizations. Can you tell us more about the role and necessity of these kinds of bodies?
There is information that we need to share with each other. For example, when a crisis occurs on campus, which system will be used to report or manage it? When a crisis call comes to the counseling office of a certain college, but the person [in crisis] is not affiliated with that college, we discuss how do to obtain consent for the provision of information according to laws protecting personal information, and how much of that information to share. We are also talking about how to respond when there is a request related to the recently-created National Mind Investment Support Project. At colleges where there is no full-time or Level 1 counselor, they sometimes consult the Center for Campus Life & Culture about crisis cases.
| Q7. |
As the members of the university community are diverse, their needs must be diverse as well. How do you meet these diverse needs?
In the course of providing counseling, there are cases where a student is socioeconomically vulnerable and needs help. For example, when a student is at risk of suicide and needs to be separated from his or her family, we work with the student's department, the university’s main administration, the dorms, and so on to establish a system that allows the student to continue attending school.
We send mass emails [publicizing our services] to international students so that they can receive counseling when necessary, and we also run group counseling in Korean and English. We have one dedicated staff member and a few part-time counselors to help the international members of the SNU community. It appears that international students have a hard time building relationships with Koreans. They seem to feel that Koreans do not share their true feelings with foreigners.
| Q8. |
Does the Center for Campus Life & Culture engage in any activities designed to create and spread a culture of respect for diversity? I am also curious if there are any programs meant to promote a sense of belonging in the SNU community.
For programs promoting a sense of belonging, there are the network-development-focused Campus Mentoring Program (CMP) for Koreans and the School-Life Mentoring Program (SMP) for international students. Mentees are first-year students and mentors are returning students. We train and supervise the mentors and also check their activity logs. And the Volunteer Management Program allows Seoul National University students to learn about the concepts of sharing and service and to build solidarity with other volunteers and also service organizations and social minorities. The Hakgwanbap Daeseonsaeng is a group of students who are having academic difficulties. For one semester, they meet every week, eat meals together, make plans together, and study together, which seems to create synergy. I heard that almost all of the participants succeeded in ending their academic probation.
| Q9. |
I think people who provide counseling must experience a lot of stress, too—are there any systems or programs for stress management or relief for employees of your center?
We’ve provided supportive counseling to an SNU Call staff member who had become quite anxious due to a rash of suicide crisis cases. And for difficult cases, we also provide supervision. If someone's having a hard time because of a counseling case, they first receive supervision, and if that doesn’t help, they receive supportive counseling. “Supervision” may take the form of a monthly meeting between counselors from multiple organizations, or a weekly one-on-one with an expert coordinator. Also, because meeting with clients may affect counselors physically by causing them to tense up, they sometimes get massages to get rid of that tension.
| Q10. |
Here’s a question we always ask in Spotlight interviews: what does “diversity” mean to you? And what would you like to see change about SNU?
I think that being psychologically vulnerable can also make one a kind of [disadvantaged] minority. Because from an object relations theory perspective, it may not be my fault, but rather the problems of my parents and society that are focused on me. I feel that my job is to help psychologically vulnerable people respect themselves and live with dignity. Part of the basic training that counselors receive is that discriminating based on age, region of origin, race, or gender is a violation of ethics. We learn a fundamental attitude of respecting everyone from the perspective of human dignity, no matter a client’s personal characteristics.
| Q11. |
Do you have anything you would like to add about diversity that the previous questions haven’t touched on?
As I have been counseling them, I have realized that SNU students are juggling so many demands. They have a lot of class assignments and exams. They enter the university through various admission channels, so some of them are not as prepared for it. Personally, I wish they would all work 2% less and be a little happier. If you run at full speed to achieve something, you will become exhausted, depressed, and more at risk of suicide, so I wish everyone would just relax 2%, take care of themselves a little more, and move in the direction of being a little happier.
When a person who thinks that they’re useless if they don't have the best grades is having suicidal thoughts, it’s very hard to help them, so I really hope that mindset goes away. I hope that we can all agree on the premise that we are useful people and valuable beings even if we don't have the best grades. My personal wish is that when an SNU student joins an organization [such as a business or graduate school program], instead of hearing that competition there is getting fiercer, we’ll hear that people there have become happier because that student has come.
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