Hi everyone,

My name is Mikael Rubin, I’m going into my 5th year in clinical psychology. I’ll be the Graduate Student Assembly Health Agency Director for the 2019-2020 academic year.

There are a few initiatives I’m trying to get off the ground and a few I’d like to continue from last year.

I’m looking for graduate students that are interested in volunteering a few hours a month to help get these initiatives started and to keep them going.

Below I’ve briefly described each initiative I’m hoping to accomplish over this next year and some related positions:

  1. Launch a university-wide survey to answer two key questions about graduate student access to mental and physical health at UT:

(1) What are some of the barriers students experience related to accessing mental and physical health care here at UT?

(2) How have students overcome those barriers or helped their peers overcome those barriers?

  1. Identify ways to resource graduate students with the means to address some of the common challenges graduate students face (such as poor sleep). The aim would be to provide graduate students with information about making changes on their own as well as utilizing resources on and off campus.
  2. Continue with and potentially expand on workshops that were facilitated through GSA last year including: workshops for managing stress or improving self-care; navigating conflicts with an advisor; healthy eating; yoga classes.
  3. Identify potential donors that might be approached for fundraising efforts around improving graduate student health.

I am looking to put together a core leadership team of six individuals: four project leads, a finance lead and a marketing lead. Project leads will help with development, coordination, and implementation of each initiative. The finance lead will work with me to develop a budget around each initiative and the marketing lead will assist with outreach and advertisement.

If you have any interest in assisting as part of the core team, or just more generally please let me know. I also welcome any questions, suggestions, or recommendations. My goal would be to form the core team over the summer and meet twice (for 1-2 hours each time) to get things started, so that we can start rolling out these initiatives in the Fall. Beginning in the Fall I would expect to meet once per month for approximately 1 hour.

 

Mikael Rubin, M.A. • (Pronouns: he/him) • Practicum Student • University of Texas at Austin • Counseling and Mental Health Center • mikaelrubin@utexas.edu

Health Agency Director – Graduate Student Assembly

Doctoral Student – Clinical Psychology 

The Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety Disorders
The University of Texas at Austin

utanxiety.com