Graduate school offers students opportunities to ask the biggest questions and to learn how to pursue new knowledge in a community of scholars. Cultivating wellbeing during graduate school enables students to pursue their goals at their highest capacity so that they can contribute to the world with meaning and purpose.
We know you care deeply about the students in your department and work tirelessly to support them as they pursue their academic goals at Illinois. We hope this toolkit helps you highlight areas of strength for your department and launches new thinking about how to support whole people as they pursue graduate education.
A few notes:
This toolkit is framed by the Inter-association definition of wellbeing – an optimal and dynamic state that allows people to achieve their full potential. Wellbeing includes health and wellness and expands to focus on capacity and agency.
It is for departments. Graduate students’ primary interface with the university is their department, and the department is perhaps the primary mover in the experience of its students. There are many ways individuals can positively impact their own and others’ wellbeing, but we want to focus here on how we, as an institution, can integrate wellbeing into our academic frameworks and think about how the systems, structures, and practices of graduate education work to influence wellbeing.
It has an academic focus. We can’t address wellbeing without talking about exercise, nutrition and mental health. Our campus and community have excellent resources to address these needs; the website wellness.illinois.edu is a great place to get started connecting to resources, from Campus Rec to the Counseling Center to the Basic Needs Office. Here we want to explore what leaning into wellbeing looks like on the academic side of campus.
It takes a systems approach. We often identify problems in individual situations and solve them for individuals. When we notice a repeated problem, systems thinking helps look at what is happening in the environment, identify the causes, and make changes upstream that can have a greater impact.
In collaboration with graduate students, graduate faculty, academic program staff, and student affairs staff, the Graduate College has identified four areas of focus for our wellbeing work: culture, knowledge pathways, mentoring and finances.
Click into each of the cards below to learn more.