Student Life

Work/Life Rx

From 5Ks to knitting, wellness programs help medical and graduate students build resilience and community

As an undergrad at Williams College, third-year medical student Nick Whitcomb was a competitive intercollegiate swimmer.

“It took up 20-plus hours of my week, but it was very therapeutic for me,” he says.

The workouts and competition schedule helped get him through a rigorous premed curriculum, but medical school has been even more demanding of his time, with little opportunity for workouts—a challenging situation for someone who’d been a competitive swimmer since the age of six.

“For the first month or so, I felt like there was a big part of me missing,” says Whitcomb. “I was very wound up and didn’t have that outlet to exercise and be social.”

He tried to take advantage of FitRec’s competition pool on the Charles River Campus with the goal of training for an Olympic tryout, but the added commute time and the official pool hours didn’t fit his schedule.

That’s when Whitcomb discovered the Medical Student Wellbeing program managed by the Student Affairs office. Embracing the opportunities the program offered, he participated in its annual 5K road race and joined the Medical Campus Run Club’s weekly group run.

“I started going to all the wellness events, and it was really nice to have that social outlet. Arguably, that was the more important part for me, because I’ve met all my closest friends through Run Club,” says Whitcomb. He now serves as the club’s coleader and as the physical wellness steering leader for the Wellness Initiative, which is run by medical students working directly with Student Affairs to promote student wellness, resource development and sharing, and wellness-centered events.

Wellness programs help medical students navigate the stresses of medical school and prepare them for life as physicians by building resiliency and self-awareness. They offer support and resources for students facing personal and academic challenges and foster recognition of the concept that professional excellence is linked to self-care.

“The focus is on helping medical students to understand that their wellness, their wellbeing, is their responsibility. We can help by providing different opportunities,” says Angela Jackson, MD, associate dean of student affairs and associate professor of medicine. “We can provide support to help students actively engage in developing the skills to meet their individual needs and to be able to manage and secure their wellbeing moving forward as physicians.”

The importance of self-care also is at the core of wellness programming offered by Graduate Medical Sciences (GMS) for master’s and PhD students.

“If you don’t decide early on that you’re going to have some sort of balance between personal wellbeing, academics, and professional development, you are not going to survive a six-year PhD program, or a one- or two-year master’s program that may be a stepping stone to medical or dental school,” says Theresa Davies-Heerema, PhD, assistant dean for GMS master’s programs and clinical associate professor of medical sciences & education.

“You need to learn how to balance academics and taking care of yourself. Have some time for yourself and your friends.”

Earning the MD/PhD is a marathon of learning and research taking between seven and 10 years to complete. According to Kristen Segars, a fourth-year MD/PhD candidate, students are constantly being compared to each other.

“The good thing about wellness clubs, in general, is that they encourage students to feel good about something that’s just for them,” says Segars, who joined the wellness program’s knitting club in her second year of medical school and has since produced hundreds of knitted items.

“You’re not just a doctor, you’re not just a scientist, you’re not just a student. You’re a whole person. Part of that is doing things for fun, doing things that make you happy and that you’re passionate about.”

BU’s History of Concern for Student Wellbeing

In 2019, the Wellbeing Project launched as a University-wide initiative. BU created the Student Wellbeing office in 2021, the same year the medical school started its Medical Student Wellbeing program and GMS unveiled the Community Catalyst Center (C3) to support its more than 1,000 graduate students.

Graduate and medical schools have a critical window of opportunity to address issues around work-life balance, mental health, financial health, and other topics before students begin their postgraduate careers.

In response to concerns about medical student wellbeing and the link to physician burnout, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education now includes medical student well-ness as one of their medical school accredita-tion standards, requiring schools to provide “an effective system that promotes wellbeing and facilitates adjustment to the physical and emotional demands of medical education.”

Across the University, the wellbeing template includes an emphasis on physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, community, and ethical wellness. Programming incorporates social activities as well as professional and personal development.

Wellness Programming Addresses Academic Stress Points

Jackson explains that programming for MD students focuses on the four stress points in academic life: arrival at the medical school; preparation for the Step 1 test; the transition to clinical rotations in the third year; and matching to resident training programs in the fourth year.

The Medical Student Wellbeing program includes individual resources and a variety of events including a wellness fair, a fall mixer, a 5K run, and more. The program also offers book clubs, cooking classes, career planning and professional events, yoga, and access to mental health and nutrition resources. Most of these ideas—and many others—are in response to MD student feedback represented by the Wellness Committee, composed of Wellness Initiative student members, medical student wellness representatives from the Student Committee on Medical School Affairs (SCOMSA), the Student Affairs office wellness program coordinator, and the dean.

In 2022, the Medical Student Wellbeing program was officially integrated into the advising curriculum. Faculty from the Academy of Medical Educators serve as core advisors for students for 30-minute, one-on-one sessions for the entirety of their medical school studies, with sessions occurring during the 9–5 class day.

“These advisors have a unique relationship with the student because they are teaching doctoring,” says Tiffany Wong, MA, program coordinator, Student Wellbeing & Advising.

“We always give students freedom to talk about something that’s pressing, that they really want to share in this dedicated, intentional time with their core advisor.”

Through the Student Affairs office, the Medical Student Wellbeing program also offers a voluntary 15-minute individualized wellness check-in, a one-on-one session with Wong during which students identify areas of improvement concerning their wellbeing, decide on an action plan, and secure resources to help implement it.

Commitment at the Highest Levels

In 2023, Medical School Dean and Medical Campus Provost Karen Antman, MD, created a Dean’s Advisory Board (DAB) Wellness Task Force to gather student input and make recommendations.

“We were asked how we make life better for medical students,” recalls Elizabeth Brown, MD, associate professor of pediatrics at the school from 1987 to 2016, DAB member and cochair of the Wellness Task Force. Topping the student wish list was the request for a fitness center, also a popular request from GMS students.

The task force identified unused space in the basement of the main Instructional Building. A $1 million donation by Dean’s Advisory Board member Richard J. Catrambone, DMD, MD’92, and his wife Sophia Catrambone is a big step towards making the $2 million facility a reality.

Last year, the Dean’s Advisory Board established the Student Wellness Fund to provide resources for student wellness initiatives.

“As students, back in 1989, we were focused on academics and managing our student debt,” says Patricia Williams, MD’89, former vice president of Worldwide Safety, Surveillance, and Risk Management for the global pharmaceutical company Pfizer. “Students today worry about academics and debt, but they also prioritize work-life balance, as does the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, which is a positive change to medical education.”

Fourth-year medical student and SCOMSA Wellness Liaison Christina Jefferson said she entered medical school a happy, social person, but the demands of medical education on personal and family time eroded some of her joy. Participating in the Student Wellness Initiative has made her more cognizant of her personal needs.

“I feel like it’s a constant conversation with yourself,” Jefferson says. “I know that I will not be that person who just does their job every day—and their job becomes their life. I would like a good work-life balance, and I feel like prioritizing my happiness and my wellness now, hopefully, can be the foundation for my future wellness.”

Graduate Student Pressures Take a Toll

Among other factors, long hours, the pressure to publish, increased competition for grants, higher data requirements for publication, the rising cost of living expenses, mentor/mentee relationships, and funding and employment uncertainties have increased the stress on graduate students.

Known as C3, the GMS Community Catalyst Center opened its doors in August 2021 with the aim of creating communities for more than 1,000 graduate students across 30 degree programs to help them adjust to Boston and the Medical Campus. Eight affinity centers now welcome students of similar backgrounds including international students, nontraditional and first-generation students, military veterans, and LGBTQIA+ students. C3 provides resources and hosts events and workshops to support students throughout their time in graduate school.

While the Medical Student Wellbeing program serves a smaller, more homogenous MD student body, GMS wellness programs face challenges in the number of students and programs as well as the range of timeframes leading to degrees. Programs vary from a year in Oral Health Sciences, a pre-dental program, to five or more years for students pursuing a doctorate.

“C3 is a community resource center for GMS students,” says Community Relations Specialist and C3 Manager Sarah Rowan. “It aims to foster holistic success across the GMS community in various buckets like academic growth, social learning, professional development, and community building.”

President of the Biomedical PhD Student Organization—which was founded to build and strengthen community among students in PhD programs, especially those in biomedical science—third-year PhD student Kaitlyn Alimenti says that C3 offers a central location on campus to easily find information, or to meet others.

“The affinity groups have been very helpful for PhD students on the Medical Campus. It gives students from marginalized backgrounds the opportunity to talk to people about issues that labmates might not necessarily talk about,” Alimenti says. “It’s less about creating a distinctive group of people who are going to hang out over and over again, and more about having friendly faces and meeting people who have similar backgrounds or struggles.”

The Role Student Input Plays

Generated through student interactions with staff and faculty, surveys, and student wellness advisory groups, student input is critical to the success of wellness programs. Alimenti points to student feedback resulting in the creation of a private space where students can go to receive telehealth mental health counseling.

Student input also inspired MD Student Affairs to successfully advocate for changes to the academic calendar. Exams for first-, second-, and third-year students are now scheduled for Fridays, giving students the weekend to decompress. Students Affairs also helped incorporate three personal days per semester—available to be used for any reason—into third-year student rotations.

“If we only focus on school all the time, it can be really difficult and draining,” says third-year medical student Kyle Quan Bui, who serves as Class of 2027 SCOMSA vice chair and as a liaison to the Student Wellness Committee. “I think BU has a pretty good culture of wellness. Most people are aware that the Wellness Committee exists and that there is programming that reaches out to varied groups of people and their different interests.”