Dog therapy for stressed students
Dogs during exam season proves huge hit with engineers
The City and Guilds union offered a novel way of recovering from exam stress relief last week – playing with dogs.
The dogs, who were brought in by the dog re-homing charity All Dogs Matter, sat in a room in CGCU, and students filed in all afternoon to play with them. They also had a few walks around campus.
This is the second time the CGCU have offered puppy therapy to its members, and it’s proved incredibly popular, with 300 sign-ups in 24 hours for this session, and all the places being booked up last time they ran the event as well. There was some queuing on the day, with some students from other departments getting turned away . Millie Tsang, the CGCU welfare officer said that having to turn people away was sad.
“Originally I was met with heavy doubts from within the CGCU and IC Union, who said it would not be approved and would also raise loads of trouble. Thankfully, I talked to College anyway,” she told FELIX. Despite recently introducing a no dogs on campus rule, permission was granted, with some limitations about who could access the dogs and the room.
Students sat in a waiting room before getting their ten minutes with the dogs, and in this time, students from different courses could mingle and chat to Millie about any welfare issues they were having.
One student arrived at the event despite having a fear of dogs. In their feedback, they told CGCU: “I really think it is a great idea against stress and fear; the latter is also quite common and I’m sure it could help more students than just me”.
Thanks to donations from students, CGCU also managed to raise several hundred pounds for the charity providing the dogs.
This form of therapy is a firm favourite at the LSE and Harvard.
