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Last week, 64 first-year medical students received a little holiday pick-me-up, courtesy of a collection of volunteers at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Arranged by the SMHS Office of Student Affairs and Office of the Dean, care packages, which included personalized notes from SMHS faculty, staff, and other medical students, were provided to the newest UND med students in the SMHS building in Grand Forks.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough this pandemic season is hard for everyone, we are finding that our first-year medical students are struggling more than most,\u201d explained the School\u2019s Associate Dean for Student Affairs James Porter, Ph.D.\u00a0\u201cThey\u2019re stressed by the adaptation to medical school, COVID, and difficulty in building social support structures in their new environment when they are only in their new environment virtually and have little opportunity to actually bond with each other or other members of the SMHS community. At this holiday season, we wanted to show our first-years a little additional support and North Dakota nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Packages were \u201cdelivered\u201d in a physically-distant sort of way at the SMHS on Thursday, Dec. 10. Students, both humbled and surprised at the packages, were exceedingly grateful.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese care packages were such a generous gift from the university faculty and staff that really demonstrated their care for students and attentiveness to mental health,\u201d said Megan Corn, first-year med student and President of the MD Class of 2024. \u201cThe hand-written notes were a beautiful touch that made us all feel closer to faculty and classmates in these trying times.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or as Corn’s classmate Jessica Zola put it, \u201cThe care packages provided by the SMHS were an extremely thoughtful surprise, and the personal letters made my day!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI still remember when I was a medical student many years ago,\u201d added SMHS Senior Associate Dean for Medicine and Research, Dr. Marc Basson. \u201cIt was certainly challenging then, and is more challenging now with the increased burden of much more information to be mastered in the curriculum. I\u2019m tremendously grateful to all of our faculty, staff, and especially our senior students who took the time to reach out in support of our first-year students this year despite their own stresses and pressures.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, 64 first-year medical students received a little holiday pick-me-up, courtesy of a collection of volunteers at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Arranged by the SMHS Office of Student Affairs and Office of the Dean, care packages, which included personalized notes from SMHS faculty, staff, and other medical students, were provided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":6558,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1172,937,1171,247,1173,248],"class_list":["post-6530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-care","tag-covid","tag-first-year","tag-medical","tag-package","tag-student"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n