Working with UBC Wellbeing and other campus partners, G+PS is encouraging academic units to consider wellbeing perspectives in their own environment, and is supporting them to strategize and implement wellbeing-related initiatives or changes. These include mental health first-aid training, related workshops for faculty, staff and students, and programmatic changes.

Whether it’s counselling, career services, communication, child-care, housing, or other key services the University provides for its students, it’s essential that the often distinctive needs of graduate students are met. G+PS works collaboratively with its many campus partners to investigate and, if necessary, address any potential gaps. Recent changes have included the mode of counselling service delivery to graduate students, priorities for 1BR in-residence apartments for graduate students, and access for graduate students to winter session housing.

There is a desire among many graduate students to have a designated ‘graduate’ space on campus where they can study, work, hold events, and socialize. While undergraduate-oriented student spaces, such as the Nest and Collegia, serve those students well, graduate students have little dedicated space and programming aimed at developing social connection and intellectual community, fostering a sense of belonging, and combating research and writing in isolation.

G+PS has worked with the Graduate Student Society and the VP Students Office on advocacy or more graduate-focused spaces for a number of years. Currently available spaces include the Research Commons in Koerner Library, the GSS Loft in the Nest, unit/faculty-specific graduate student lounges, and library spaces. Most recently the Graduate Life Centre in Thea Koerner House opened in January 2024. The first phase of that project was completed with financial support from Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, VP Students and the Provost Office and saw a renovation of the ground floor of Thea Koerner House. With areas for quiet study, events and child-minding, it is a mixed-use space that addresses the needs of the ever-changing graduate student body.  Future phases will renovate the other floors of the building and add bookable rooms for academic, social, and cultural needs.

A joint pilot initiative with Counselling Services, Wellbeing and Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies offers additional mental health and wellbeing support geared specifically towards graduate students and centered around known stressors many graduate students are faced with. This pilot was created out of the identified need for more strategic mental health support for graduate students as highlighted in the Graduate Student Wellbeing Status Report (2017), a joint partnership between the Office of the Vice-President Students, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and graduate student representatives.

Bringing together additional key campus partners to help support these facilitated support group sessions, the goals of each will be to identify and address key mental health concerns, foster resiliency, develop proactive coping strategies, identify resources, and create social connections through discussions.