Hi everyone, so wonderful to connect with you at this year’s McNair Promising Practices Institute hosted by the University of Central Florida. I hope you take away some inspiration to simply breathe with your students and encourage them to take care of their mental health. I believe these items to be related and I hope your personal exploration with mindfulness practice leads to some hearty discussions and sharing of insight.

There are many great meditation apps out there, but Amanda and I would love for you to join our Mindful Scholar group on the Insight Timer app and enjoy the exchange. Mindfulness truly is a practice that takes time to grow. I’m excited for more of our scholars to experience the benefits and to have daily meditation as one of their key tools in their toolbox bound for grad school success!

I’m also excited for our McNair staff to do the same!

Here’s a link (CLICK HERE) to my presentation on mental health in graduate education. I encourage you to explore the growing resources out there on helping our students maintain their mental health while pursuing their Ph.D.’s.

The PhDepression is leading this important conversation and I hope you invite more McNair scholars to contribute their stories and be part of what hopefully becomes a pivotal shift in graduate school culture.

Here are some additional resources that you might find helpful in supporting your scholars in their health + wellness. In particular, I encourage you to check out my “signature self-care talk” which is a great way to get the conversation on wellness started with your scholars. I’m also happy to do a live webinar with your students anytime … just shoot me a note at lynn.curry@cmich.edu.

Here’s a link to the webinar >>

Foundation of Strength: Making Self-Care Part of Your Academic Journey

Grad App Tracker >>

Sign up for a free Trello account and email me your username so that I can create a “base” Grad App Tracker board for you that you can tailor to your own needs, share with your students or simply gather ideas from to create your own. Besides using Trello to help manage the graduate school application process, you might wish to explore using it … for just about anything!

Trello is a great tool and we pretty much use it to organize “everything McNair!”

I posted a Grad App Tracker tutorial video HERE that goes over primary features + functionality, but again, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you need help getting started!

One thing I didn’t mention in the video is that you should definitely DOWNLOAD THE TRELLO APP to go along with things … one of the best parts is being able to keep track of notes and “snippets of information” as you go … having the app on your phone makes that even easier … say your student just finished meeting with a prospective faculty advisor and wants to jot down a few items from their conversation … they can easily do that and post it under a particular school list … and then “tag you” so you can take a quick peek minutes later!

Definitely suggest checking this resource out! lmc :)