Somewhere around my hundredth survey response, I stopped and just sat there.
Nothing shocking had happened.
That was the problem.
For my final year project, I've spent the past year reading anonymous responses from fellow undergraduates about how they're actually coping.
I expected numbers.
What I got, again and again, felt closer to a confession nobody had asked them to make.
Nobody described one big breakdown.
What kept showing up instead was smaller, and heavier.
Weeks of bad sleep before an exam.
Money worries pushed to the back of the mind until fees are due again.
The exhaustion of smiling through a lecture while falling apart underneath it.
What stayed with me was how careful almost all the responses were, students describing real struggle in the smallest, most minimising language, the kind people reach for when they've learned struggling isn't something you're supposed to make noise about.
You've probably met this student without realising it.
Never misses a deadline.
Sits quietly near the front.
Hands in solid work.
Then one week, just stops showing up. Nobody saw it coming, because nobody was really looking.
A student who's anxious or withdrawn often gets told to pray more, not because anyone stops caring, but because that's the only language many of us were raised with for something we were never taught to name properly.
Almost every campus has a counselling office. Most students still never walk through that door, not because they don't know it's there, but because walking in still feels like admitting to something they've spent years learning to hide.
If this project has taught me anything, it's that the students who look fine are usually the ones worth checking on first.
That's a choice, one we get to make every day, whether we notice it or not.
The writer is a Biochemistry/Molecular Biology student,
University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS).
