DeKALB – The ENGL 203 course has been incorporating innovative changes to its research project for years. This year’s projects are no different, but the students are taking an active shift to go beyond just a good grade.

NIU’s annual Showcase of Student Writing on Thursday in the Duke Ellington Ballroom presented the top projects of NIU’s ENGL 203 courses.

Projects delved into studies on the biggest mental health problems for collegiate athletes, solutions for maximizing parking at NIU and improvements for reporting sexual assaults on campus.

Eric Hoffman, assistant director of first year composition, said the showcase has been a staple for approximately 14 years in the English department, but it saw changes in the past years that allowed the project to incorporate more student interest.

“Before we started doing the showcase, we did what you would think of as a traditional research paper project,” Hoffman said. “Students generally didn’t care, like they were checking a box, they were writing a paper to write a paper, and they weren’t typically very invested in the topics.”

The preliminary English course, ENGL 203, is for students to learn critical reading and research-based writing skills.

“A couple of years after we started the project, we started incorporating primary research,” Hoffman said. “Especially when we started focusing on issues local to NIU, I found the student engagement increased dramatically.”

The project requires students to solve a problem at NIU in a small group and formulate both primary and secondary research to provide a solution.

A group titled “Struggling Under the Lights” researched the causes of mental illness in student athletes and surprisingly found that the main cause of tension was the coaches.

“We’re all athletes ourselves, and so it was like a lightbulb clicked when we wanted to figure out what mentally stressed athletes and realized that the coach has a big impact,” said first-year marketing major Kelsey Neuman.

The four-person group of student athletes conducted a survey of 64 student athletes to find out if they had ever felt overwhelmed or stressed.

The group found 78.1% said ‘yes’ in response, and 72.5% replied ‘yes’ or ‘sometimes’ when asked if a coach or coaching staff negatively affected their mental health.

The group’s solution to coach induced stress was to mandate a coach workshop and assessment that would require coaches to be knowledgeable about mental health and better relate to their players. A website was made that included the data they had collected as well as statistics from other collegiate athlete studies and a TED talk.

Within the solution of their projects, students are tasked with creating a physical way, often a website or an advertisement, for solving their problems.

But many students are making an effort to go beyond their project’s criteria and produce a solution themselves.

Another group at the event was labeled “Reporting Sexual Assault at NIU” which discovered a large difficulty with reporting assaults was a lack of campus outlets and security, which they sought to remedy by spreading flyers around campus and directly through professors.

“The AAUW (American Association of University Women) found that 77% of campuses reported zero instances of sexual assault, which is where we found out that some schools don’t require people to make a report because they would lose federal funding,” said first-year elementary education major Gabriella Willson.

Another group titled “Better Care, Better Life” found that they could provide free mental health services to NIU from their data about the struggles of getting counseling on campus.

“There’s a page on the website specifically made just for representatives of this school or any type of school to get into contact with the JD Foundation,” said first-year time arts major Kaab Mustafa. “I actually pitched that to a representative that was walking around. So if we’re able to do that we might be able to get actual non-profit workers coming over here and filling up for more employees that we need.”

Students ended the showcase with grading by judges and the chance to win 50 points of extra credit in their respective classes.