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Anyone who’s been at ETH for even a week will tell you that studying here is demanding and that prioritizing your mental health is not always easy next to long hours of studying, tough exams, and very limited holidays.
However, if you can’t prioritize your mental health, let me help you with that!
VSETH and AVETH have decided to launch a survey on the wellbeing of students and academic staff at ETH called ‘wiegETHs’. It will help us to do exactly what ETH likes to do so very much: quantify our problems.
In all seriousness, the first wiegETHs survey launched in 2019 was an enormous success. 42.2% of ETH students filled it out, smashing the classic argument of “This isn’t representative”, or,if you want to make it more mathematical, “This isn’t statistically significant”, that anyone who’s ever been involved in university politics has heard many times. With the irrefutable evidence of ETH’s impacting the mental health of its students, the student representatives in various departments were able to bring about a multitude of changes that make studying at ETH more compatible with promoting one’s mental wellbeing.
One of the biggest changes that came about in the course of seeking to improve students’ mental health is PAKETH, a project explicitly intended to alleviate pressure and transform the summer break into an actual break. (If you don’t know what PAKETH is, you can find out on this website: https://ethz.ch/staffnet/en/teaching/projects/paketh.html.)
Another peculiarity of this edition of the wiegETHs survey: The last such survey was in 2019, right before COVID. This one will be post-COVID, but pre-PAKETH (the new academic calendar). So, by comparing the 2019 results with the new ones, we will likely see what negative effects COVID had on our mental health, and what was already bad pre-pandemic. On a more positive note, we will also be able to see the positive effects that the measures taken after the 2019 survey have had on students. And, after the relaunch of wiegETHs in 2029, we can judge how much PAKETH has helped to improve the wellbeing of the students. But unfortunately, talking about positive things is significantly less catchy in newspapers than talking about all things bad and negative, or so a statistically significant survey says…)
Tldr: fill out the wiegETHs survey! It only takes 13 minutes! The survey comes out right after the Easter break, delivered straight into your emails. Get your friends to do it! Hey, get your enemies to do it, too! Chances are they need someone to look out for their mental health for them, too.
More information on the wiegETHs survey can be found at: https://vseth.ethz.ch/politik/wiegeths/
