While Binghamton’s “De-Stress” events are a regular part of Finals Week, using tuition money that could’ve been spent on providing a better education to instead distract students from how inadequate most professors are at distributing workload throughout the semester, not all students are fans of them. “I just simply cannot do work on a project without the intense stress of a looming deadline, so De-Stress events are actually counterproductive for me,” said Cameron Cottle, a senior majoring in Math. “Thankfully, the new Stress Station is there for everyone else who feels the same way.”
The Stress Station, the brainchild of Provost Donald Niemann, gives students the chance to recreate the conditions that got them into the Premier Public Ivy by having a scale replica hologram of a student’s pushiest parent or guardian yell at them that they have to work harder or they’ll never amount to anything. The installation, which makes use of the Engineering School’s latest achievements, has already helped over a 1,000 students prepare for the end-of-semester push. Users have praised its variety of settings, including “Guilt-Tripping,” “Negative Comparisons to Siblings,” and “Passive Aggressive,” the subtly demanding tone of which has been singled out as a strong point of the project, with Cottle confirming that he hadn’t had time to shower in three days and lived in constant fear of failure but had never been more productive.
Phillippa Lahm, who led the design team as part of her senior thesis project, expressed her delight to the BUTT over the reaction the Stress Station had gotten. “It’s been a dream come true so far, and if everything goes right, we should be able to introduce our ‘Living Vicariously.’ preset by next semester. And if that’s enough for my parents, nothing will be.”