Undergrads Find It Helpful To Find Have A Place To Talk Leslie Rice ------------------------------------- Homewood News and Information I'm listening. Two words a lot of people don't hear often, do very well themselves or even have the boldness to demand. But every night in two rooms on the Homewood campus, a group of Hopkins students devote themselves to the forgotten art of listening. And as the holidays loom, those two rooms can get pretty busy. Since it began a dozen years ago, A Place To Talk, Hopkins' peer counseling program, has become, for many undergraduates, the heartbeat of the Hopkins campus. Last year the program logged 500 visits from students who wanted to talk about issues in their lives. During those years in which a crisis occurs--a suicide, for example--the center has been known to log upward of 700 visits. On the first floor of AMR1, a coffee pot gurgles next to a box of Dunkin' Donuts while an odd assortment of toys--Slinkies, Legos and crayons--randomly clutters the APTT room. "Sometimes students need an excuse to come into the room," explains Elle Rabinovich, a senior who chairs APTT. "So they come in, grab a doughnut and fiddle around with the Legos while we ask them what's going on." The cardinal rule for peer counselors is not to give advice. Instead, peer counselors are active listeners. "What students often need is for someone to help direct their thoughts, to be asked questions," says Rabinovich, an international relations and anthropology double major minoring in Russian. "Often they have the answers themselves, they just need to find them. If a student is in crisis, we'll walk them to the Counseling Center." All 25 peer counselors are intensely committed to the program. They train for three hours every Wednesday night for an entire semester and, once trained, work one night every week from 8 p.m. to midnight. Program consultant Clare King, from the Counseling and Student Development Center, and a psychiatry instructor, says it is exceedingly rare for counselors ever to miss a shift. They know some students have grown comfortable with certain counselors and have come to depend on that counselor's shift. "Last week, for example, one of the peer counselors missed a shift for the first time because she went with a student who was taken to the hospital," says King. "One of the freshmen left messages for her saying he was worried about her and wanted to make sure she was all right and taking care of herself." Peer counselors often wonder who gets the most out of APTT, the volunteers or the students. For many volunteers, their commitment to the program often lasts beyond college. In fact, two Hopkins graduates, one now completing medical school at Hopkins, the other a graduate student at the School of Public Health, still work regular shifts for APTT at Homewood. Alumni volunteers from 12 years ago are still in touch with King and visit APTT whenever in town. "The joke is that once you're in APTT, you can never leave," Rabinovich says. "It's impossible not to feel connected to each other and to the program." Peer counselors also say the listening skills they acquire through APTT are tools they use every day. In the busy emergency room of a Sacramento hospital, Steve Bretz ('91) says he relies as much on the listening skills he gained through APTT as he does on his medical training. "Those skills we learned--listening without judging, how to position your body and use your hands, the eye contact, all those things that tell a person you're really listening--I use those skills every single day in the ER," says Bretz. "Sometimes you have to dig to find out the real reason why someone is in the emergency room. It makes me a better doctor." Three years ago, a handful of APTT volunteers began spending summers in Eastern Europe to implement peer counseling programs in high schools in Hungary, Romania and Lithuania and in refugee camps in Bosnia and Croatia. Kathleen Curry ('93) was one of the first APTT students to travel overseas. "It is much harder to implement the program in a former communist country than on an American college campus," says Curry, who spent two years in Lithuania. "Introspection is not a culturally valued thing in these countries. Most of the students don't find it at all easy to talk about themselves or even consider it useful. So when they do grasp it and begin to trust peer counseling, it is intensely gratifying." ----------------------------------------------------------------- APTT is located in the basement of Levering Hall and in the lobby of AMR1 under Baker Hall. It is open from 8 p.m. until midnight every night except Saturday through Dec. 20 and will reopen for intersession Jan. 2. No appointments are needed. Students interested in becoming a peer counselor should call Clare King at (410) 516-8278. -----------------------------------------------------------------