"Visiting With"...Counseling Services

Who we serve:

We serve all currently enrolled students at UTSA.  We also provide consultation to faculty and staff, while protecting the privacy and confidentiality of our student clients.  Additionally, we work with other departments within Student Affairs to provide prevention programming in an effort to improve the overall UTSA experience and increase student success.

Our innovations or successes:

Support Group Offerings : Counseling Services is offering new support groups for the Fall semester to include: Grief Support, Equality UTSA (GLBTIQ), "Mom's" group, "Women's' group, Anxiety group, Veteran's group, as well as sponsoring AA and ALANON groups through the Recovery Center.

The "CURE"; Campus United for Respect and Education: A new student service group, lead by Melissa Hernandez where peer mentors focus on promoting healthy and respectful relationships including the prevention of sexual assault and relationship violence. The "CURE"  will provide members opportunities to develop their leadership skills through training, peer education and mentoring, outreach, and campus advocacy.

Women's Resource Center: Be on the look-out for our new Women's Resource Center programming with new resources and initiatives targeting the prevention of sexual assault and relationship violence amongst other offerings.  The center will be open to all students and will also provide information, resources, and education regarding human sexuality and GLBTIQ issues.    

Longest serving staff member: Sylvia Robinson, Administrative Assistant with the 1604 Counseling Services (started May 2000).  Thus, most of our staff are relatively new hires within the last six years.

Newest staff member: Dr. Mia Veve, Counseling Psychologist,  though a good clinical generalist she cites the following areas of interest: GLBTIQ issues, Bilingual psychotherapy, sexual assault, relationships, and family of origin issues (started September 10, 2007).

You may not know that: We have a new building and new offices. Our new offices are now located behind the Student Health Services in the Recreation Wellness Center (RWC) 1.810. Our office hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. everyday but Tuesday and Wednesday when we remain open until 7 p.m. (except between semesters when we close at 5 p.m.). Our new building also hosts the Women's Resource Center and the Recovery Center along with a classroom and conference room. Our offices at the Downtown campus are located at BV 1.308.

• Counseling Services can assist a student deal with homesickness, a lost love, or more complicated issues of depression or anxiety. We also enjoy providing educational and interactive experiences that allow our very healthy student population to develop better coping skills and future (long-term) focused aspirations. We also attempt to build a stronger feeling of belonging to the UTSA campus community and hope (with the efforts of other staff and departments) to affect a positive and enlightened change in our students. We hope that change will allow students to achieve their desired goals in a healthy and positive way.

• We also provide Learning Disability Evaluations to our student population. Though the requests are large and our resources limited, we attempt to identify learning challenges that negative impact student success. We also work to identify ways to remediate those challenges. It is very rewarding work.

• Therapy remains our passion. We enjoy providing individual, group, and couples counseling to those who request it. We thrive on observed changes and positive movement of our students. Though our campus student population is as normal and healthy as any other campus, there remains human challenges that we hope to guide students successfully through and we thoroughly enjoy attending their graduations

How you can reach us: ext. 4140

web site – www.utsa.edu/cs