The stereotypical college student lives on coffee, late-night pancakes and very little sleep, which can take a toll on the mind and body.  Hilltopper HealthQuest is a website that offers St. Edward’s University students tools to manage their health.

The website is managed by the Health and Counseling Center, located on the first floor of Lady Bird Johnson Hall. Students can find numerous articles and self-assessments on various wellness topics like maintaining positive relationships, managing stress and anxiety, improving mood and self-esteem and controlling anger and impulsivity.

“Hilltopper HealthQuest was designed to provide students easy access to a wide range of educational materials about different aspects of wellness,” Claudia Carroll, director of the Health and Counseling Center, said. “It also allows us to meet the millennial students where they tend to get a vast amount of their information – through technology and the Internet.”

Nearly 1,000 students use HealthQuest annually, and 86 percent of students surveyed would recommend the site to fellow classmates. Most popular modules include relationships, body image, mood, stress management and sleep.

The Health and Counseling Center however, “can’t track a student’s viewing of certain articles to their engagement with the Health and Counseling Center,” Carroll said.

The Health and Counseling Center also conducts wellness and outreach programs. Over 5,500 students attended educational sessions last year.

“Obviously, some students may have attended more than one event,” Carroll said. “However, we do reach a significant number of students through our tabling events, awareness months and workshops with student groups and classrooms.”

These meetings are not for a student wishing to keep everything private. Meetings are not therapy or medical interventions; therefore, the laws of confidentiality do not apply like they would with the clinical services offered at the Health and Counseling Center.

“In our programs, we do ask students to share only at the level where they are comfortable and to be respectful that other students may share personal information that they would want kept in that group,” Carroll said.

The Health and Counseling Center also offers, in addition to the wellness programs, brief individual, couples and group psychotherapy, crisis intervention, consultation to students, faculty, staff and families, some very limited psychiatric services and biofeedback.

The Health Center also offers basic health care appointments for students for acute and minor illnesses like colds, sore throats or sprains.