Penn State seniors to give a gift with staying power

For more than 150 years, Pennsylvania State University's departing senior class has given a gift to the university: a solar panel, a green roof, sculpture, signs, and scholarships.

This year, seniors voted for a less visible project, yet one they hope will have a lasting impact. They will donate what could be as much as $250,000 for an endowment to support mental-health services at the university.

Senior Ramon Guzman Jr., 20, a Central High graduate from Philadelphia who is executive director of the senior class gift campaign, wept when he learned the results of the vote.

He had tried to take his own life in his freshman year and was helped by the very services his class would now support.

"I was so overwhelmed that people actually saw that as a need," said Guzman, an education and public policy major. "We're so constantly bound by the material stuff, bound by what we can put a finger on or what we can see. To be in a class that basically says, 'I don't care what it does for me, I care what it does for others,' is amazing."

Student leaders say the gift is an indication of growing awareness about the importance of mental-health services on campuses, which have been scarred by the suicides of those who suffered silently.

"We had a lot of students saying they didn't want another bench on campus," said Alissa Janoski, 22, a senior technical writing major from Barto, Berks County. "They wanted something that was really going to make an impact."

Each year, the senior class gift committee receives a couple hundred proposals and, with input from faculty and staff, narrows the lot to three. The senior class then votes.

Penn State's Counseling & Psychological Services center has been considered before. Dennis Heitzmann, senior director, said he believed publicity about campus suicides made the difference. That and Guzman's effort.

"Ramon's influence was critical," he said. "And we're just more visible as an entity."

The center will use the money for more clinical services, he said. Two years ago, the center added five employees but still not enough to meet the growing demand.

Nationally, collegiate mental-health centers have experienced a nearly 30 percent increase in students seeking help over the last six years, a far greater increase than the growth in enrollment, according to a recent study by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, based at Penn State.

Penn State's center sees about 3,600 students a year at its University Park campus.

Guzman, of Philadelphia's Feltonville section, was one of them. A high achiever at Central, he didn't earn a 4.0 his first semester and worried about his future. After his suicide attempt, a professor escorted him to the mental-health center for help.

The center helped him get his life back on track and learn, he said, "to feel good about myself."

And to embrace that life is not always perfect.

ssnyder@phillynews.com

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To contribute, go to http://www.classgift.psu.edu.