Peer educators counsel students on health and wellness throughout college

Health and wellness are two areas that college students have a tendency to struggle with. They're faced with balancing classes, homework, club meetings, jobs and oh, a social life, too. Then there's this little, essential thing called sleep, which is sometimes squeezed in for a couple of hours. All of this can lead to a lot of all-nighters, a lot of stress and a lot of bad habits.

The Redhawk Health Educator program was created to help Southeast Missouri State University students cope with issues involving anything from time management to nutrition to alcohol abuse.

"Right now we have about 11 peer educators, and basically they're trained to educate Southeast students on facts about health and wellness topics," Redhawk Health Educator adviser Sara Wagganer said. "We do that through, like, presentations, or we like to call them programs and awareness campaigns like tabling."

Tabling is when a table is set up to hand out informational materials about certain health and wellness topics. The Redhawk Health Educator program will also offer individual consultation. In order to counsel other students, members completed training to become certified peer educators.

"We all participated in a weekend-long certification training which we became certified peer educators," Wagganer said. "A lot of that training was how to handle students that kind of aren't ready to go to a professional counselor yet. They have an issue, but it's not that serious quite yet. They just want someone to talk to. Of course, our thought is it's kind of better to talk to peers rather than going to a counselor if you're not ready for that yet. A lot of training is in how to talk to someone about a health or a wellness topic on a one-on-one basis."

Freshman Jessica Strunk, the president of the Redhawk Health Educator program, decided to join because she was previously involved in helping students with drug abuse in high school through a campaign she created called "Tell Your Story."

"It's basically [a campaign where] kids can anonymously share and talk about their negative experiences with drugs and alcohol, and it actually got pretty successful and big in my school," Strunk said. "Then I met up with the NCADA [National Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse], so they're actually going to be spreading it to all of the high schools and middle schools in the state."

However, members don't necessarily have to have experience in health and wellness topics. Students with any major can become a certified peer educator as long as they have a passion for helping people, Wagganer said.

"You've got to kind of be a role model," Wagganer said. "You have to practice good health habits yourself and not do anything stupid to show that you are a peer educator. I know for a fact and I've heard stories of peer educators in the past that have not practiced what they preached. I mean, just practice what we're preaching."

While the Redhawk Health Educator program is not entirely new to Southeast's campus, it is much bigger and plans to be more active than it has been in previous years.

Wagganer became the assistant director of fitness and wellness in January and said the peer educator program was handed down to her.

"We've had one before," Wagganer said. "It was very small. There was like two or three peer educators, and they mainly did programs and a little bit of tabling. They didn't do anything with the one-on-one and that's something that's new."

The Redhawk Health Educators will present for any student organizations, faculty or staff groups who would like them to. Each presentation can be tailored to meet the groups' needs and will be created by the peer educators themselves, Wagganer said.

The Redhawk Health Educator program is not meant to take the place of Counseling and Disability Services. If a student's issue is out of the realm of the Redhawk Health Educators, the student will be directed to counseling.

"I hope students just see it as, you know, a precursor or just another option," Wagganer said. "I really see people that just aren't ready to do the counseling thing yet. They just want to talk to somebody. Maybe they can't talk to their friends about it or their friends just don't quite understand. Sometimes it's good to get a different perspective from someone that's not in your social circle to just see what kind of advice and someone that is passionate about the health field, that's passionate about helping people."

The Redhawk Health Educator's first presentation will take place Oct. 10 at Friday Night Leadership. If interested in having the Redhawk Health Educators present about a topic to an organization or group, call (573) 651-2901.