NILES — Faith White, 21, of Niles, said her last semester at Southwestern Michigan College was a “disaster.” Not because of her professors or her classes — she has loved them both — but because of stress.

Conveniently, her honors program research project sought to find ways to calm students down during tumultuous times.

In fact, without the visual arts major’s “disaster” semester, her research project may not have been realized.

It was White’s first semester without an art class, something she told a faculty member. Her professor put White’s stress and her lack of art classes together and offered her a research question for a project: Does creating art lessen college student stress?

“You are living proof that really helps,” White recalled her professor saying.

With three weeks before the end of the semester and her required research project deadline, White set to work. What she found was that small art projects can take stress away, so long as the right type of art project is conducted.

Near finals week, the Niles native gathered students from a class and divided them into two groups.

Half served as a control group. They answered White’s questions from the professional State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, a way to gauge anxiety levels.

The other half served as an experimental group. They took the test before and after White led them in an art project.

The project was making friendship bracelets.

“There are different aspects of art,” she said. “Some have a repetitive motion that can be calming. That was why I picked the friendship bracelets.”

That choice, White said, was what led to her first error, for lack of a better word.

Aside from former President Barrack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden popularizing the friendship bracelet between men, White said friendship bracelets are stereotypically associated as an art project for women.

That meant some male testers may have been less enthused about the project than other art projects, meaning stress levels may have been skewed.

White also said that some art projects have a specific, tangible result, like friendship bracelets. That can be more daunting than, say, a free draw. Participants may place expectations on themselves to create art that fits an ideal, which places stress on them, she said.

Another error came naturally.

“There’s bias, because a lot of times, when you do something like that, your participants have in mind what they think you want,” White said.

White said that her participants could have guessed that she was hoping their stress levels would go down by completing an art project, and they would write down unconsciously untruthful results to reflect that expectation.

While the word “error” tends to have negative connotations in experiments, White said her choice to use friendship bracelets and natural human bias have helped her.

When she begins teaching an art course, she now knows to pay attention to gender stereotypes and expectations of outcome when choosing the course’s projects.

The data showed that the art did help people destress.

“It was a good experience,” she said. “The more I can learn about art and how it interacts with people and how it affects people, the better.”

White may put her new knowledge to use soon. Next March, she will help art teacher Gloria Seitz with a class of young children at a local Hobby Lobby. Then, White will teach a discounted class through Seitz’s teaching venture, New Creations Art, to students who missed the enrollment cutoff.

Seitz is the reason why White became interested in art education. A friend of hers planned to take a class with Seitz about a decade ago, and White followed suit. Her friend ended up dropping out before the class began, but White stuck with it and has ever since.

Eventually, deciding on a college crept around a corner. White was deciding between Lake Michigan College and SMC, but a clerical error caused White to never receive an LMC acceptance letter.

So, SMC it was. There, White’s love for art increased through a part-time job as a docent and through the guidance and teaching from numerous art professors.

She said two fateful acts, following her friend and a clerical error, led to where she is now, and she is grateful for it.

“It has definitely been a blessing,” she said. “I really believe that God has had a hand in it the entire time.”

And as for the “disaster” semester? It turned out great — on paper at least. White received all As.