MI Diaries highlight life at Michigan State University
EAST LANSING, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - A project created by Michigan State University professors to collect data after the COVID-19 pandemic is helping students and the Spartan community heal after last year's mass shooting.
Through MI Diaries, those stories, if the storytellers allow, are put on the project's webpage for anyone to listen to. Some are added to special collections that all follow the same theme.
"The normal way that the project works is every week people send us their recordings, and we'll pick a handful of stories that sort of represent what we've been hearing that week from people," said Betsy Sneller, who studies linguistics at MSU.
"When the violence happened here on Feb. 13, we actually started getting responses from people before we even asked anyone about it, so like the night of, we started getting diary entries. It felt different than the other kinds of special collections because we were the people impacted."
Sneller says the project isn't meant to replace other mental health resources, but she hopes as long as funding can sustain it, the project can do on and keep documenting life around MSU.
"The most common thing that we hear from people is, 'Wow, that was really therapeutic to talk about what's going on in my life.' So the short answer is actually as long as we have funding ... it would be amazing for this to last for 50 years," she said.