Most people can agree being a college student isn’t always easy. Whatever the situation may be, balancing life can be like barely getting by. Luckily, Mesa provides many tools and resources to not only help students balance the ins and outs of life’s chaos, but thrive in the midst of it. One of these resources, provided by Mesa’s Health and Services Center, is a Wednesday workshop held in the Avanza Center. This workshop is held in order to acquire tools and skills to deal with mental health, sleep hygiene, stress and anger management, finance handling, responsible drinking, managing toxic relationships and so much more. Aurora San Pedro, the director of these workshops, is a therapist at the Student Health and Services Center and a major advocate for helping provide mental health resources for students. Aurora explained that The Health and Services Center even conducted a survey asking about the general needs of the students and in that survey a large percentage of them said finances were one of the biggest areas they needed help with. With that intel the first workshop pertained to finances.
This workshop was led by Benjamin Hewitt, a financial advisor from Northwestern Mutual. During this seminar, students had the privilege of learning from an expert about money management, credit score improvement, benefits of investing in the stock market, retirement savings, tax information, and much more. Not only do these tools prove to be useful as a young adult, but they can be vital to reducing stress in the future. Benjamin Hewitt advises on how many people do not know much about what to save or when to start saving. He recommends following the “20, 60, 20 rule.” This includes using 60 percent of your monthly earnings on living expenses, 20 percent on leisure and fun, and 20 percent should be kept in savings and investing. Hewitt talks about what to keep an eye out for later on in life and provides resources and basic knowledge on how to handle these endeavors. He states that “stress in general is caused by a lack of control, one of them is lack of knowledge.”
With that being said, Mesa is on your side. These Wednesday workshops are held to support, encourage, and help students whether they are struggling with balancing life or merely looking for new tools to store in the tool box for the future. So, go get some life long tips to thrive and succeed in life!
