College can be stressful. Many universities offer counseling, social events and other resources for students to help alleviate that stress. But on large campuses like those in the University of California system, even finding all the options can be a daunting task.
“We have a great deal of resources for students,” said Dr. Ed Junkins, executive director of UC San Diego's Student Health and Well-Being. “A lot of times students don't know how to get to these resources, so they can’t help themselves when it's early enough to intervene.”
In a spring 2023 survey, 40% of UC San Diego students reported that stress negatively impacted their academics. More than half reported feeling lonely.
The State of California appropriated $5 million in funding for the university to create a mental health platform for students.
“The interpretation of that call on our campus was to put thought into designing and innovating an app for students, by students,” Junkins said.
The app UC San Diego students and staff developed is called Willo. It features events, activities and campus resources tailored to individual users’ interests.
Willo launched last fall after two years of work. Jarenz Castillo, a fourth-year cognitive science student, helped design it.
“I am pretty much aware of all the resources that we have on campus, or at least I thought,” Castillo said. “Once I started working on Willo, we were looking at so many resources, whether it be mental, physical health, spirituality. I started to realize how much I don’t know.”
The app first asks users to select the types of resources that interest them. In the mental health category, students can select tags like grief and loss, group counseling and crisis care. The physical health category includes outdoor wellness, substance abuse prevention and nutrition. Academic tags include study spaces, writing support and resources for transfer students.
Then, the app shows resources students might like based on those preferences, from basketball games and camping trips to career fairs and food pantries. Crisis lines and other emergency services are also accessible from the home page.
Through student interviews and focus groups, the app’s designers learned that mental health and well-being aren’t just about going to therapy.
“A big part of our finding with the students originally was that the challenges with mental health are not just about somebody being depressed, but rather the causes of depression or anxiety or whatever that might be,” said Manas Bedmutha, a doctoral student in computer science. “That can relate to the overall wellness of a person. It could be your academics or housing insecurity or anything else.”
Bedmutha designed the app’s artificial intelligence. Along with the categories students pick when customizing their preferences, the AI tracks how students interact with the app so it can make better recommendations.
"As we get more activity on the app, we start learning a lot more about what is the overall, what I like to call, 'the pulse of the campus,'" he said. "What are students generally liking or not liking?"
He said university administrators could use that data when deciding what kinds of resources, classes and activities to offer.
Like Castillo, Bedmutha was also surprised to find resources he didn’t know about, like a surfboard shaping studio.
“I’m a very outgoing, social person. And I’m always down for any free food event or activity around campus. I think I would know most of the resources or things around me, just because I know where to find free food,” Bedmutha said. “But I still did not know about a lot of these things.”
Junkins said other UC campuses could eventually use Willo for their students, too.
In the meantime, Bedmutha, Castillo and other students who worked on the app are already seeing it in action. They’re featured in the promotional materials around campus.
“To see my friends’ faces on bus stops, even off campus, it's the coolest thing ever,” Castillo said.
The app’s latest update features collections of resources for different types of students, like freshmen and transfer students getting to know the campus.
Junkins said they hope to have 10,000 people — nearly a quarter of the student population — using the app by this fall.
