College of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences student Daniel Thompson gained first-hand experience as an intern with WVU’s Office of Health Promotion and Wellness, helping to design the release of the recently announced WVU employee wellness toolkit.
The CPASS health and well-being student attended meetings with faculty and staff to gather information for the project. “I worked directly with Dr. Amy Sidwell on this effort. I met with each of the OHPW priority action teams and the advisory council to understand their well-being priorities,” Thompson said. “Using the knowledge gained from these discussions and a literature review, I established the wellness toolkit and presented it via Zoom to the University community.”
Erin Jordan, health and well-being program coordinator and teaching assistant professor, served as Thompson’s internship supervisor.
"Daniel's experience as an intern with the OHPW is exactly the kind of experiential learning experience we want for our health and well-being students. It's a great opportunity for students to put into practice what they are learning in the classroom. We are grateful to Dr. Sidwell and all our other experiential learning experience supervisors for mentoring our students," Jordan said.
Thompson, from Charleston, W.Va., says the health and well-being major has helped support his targeted career path of becoming a high school level STEM teacher in anatomy, physiology and health education, through its emphasis on health education. “I was previously in exercise physiology which had more of a clinical application emphasis. However, the health and well-being major includes substantial health education and promotion that I will be able to incorporate into my future teaching practices,” he said.
“In our discussions, we found that we required a one-stop shop for employees to find ideas for keeping themselves well at home and at work,” Amy Sidwell, OHPW program director, said. “To our knowledge, an employee wellness toolkit had never been developed for WVU faculty and staff.”
“Most colleges and universities offer a wide array of resources for their student population regarding wellness,” Thompson said. “However, students are not the only group on campus in need of wellness resources. There is a clear need for similar services geared toward our faculty and staff.”
The Toolkit is organized within WVU’s six well-being priorities: physical, community, financial, social, purposeful and emotional. It includes resources available at the University, as well as best practices from other institutions and workplace wellness organizations.