Navigating Health and Wellness as a College Student
Frequent parties, long late-night conversations in dorm rooms, and marathon study sessions tend to define college life.
Unfortunately, quality sleep, healthy eating, and attentive self-care tend not to.
Given that reality, college students sometimes struggle to know how best to navigate their own health concerns. And parents who worry from afar about a child’s wellbeing—especially when that child is away from home for the first time—can feel a little lost when it comes to offering guidance and support.
Enter Laura Kogelman. Medical director for Tufts Medical Center’s Collegiate Center for Wellness (CCW) and a longtime expert in infectious disease, Kogelman recently was named the inaugural Barbara McGovern, M.D., and David Stone, M.D., Professor of Infectious Diseases at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Before establishing the Collegiate Center for Wellness, Kogelman served as the director of Tufts Medical Center’s Infectious Disease Clinic. She is an expert on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and on HIV treatment, prevention, and education, and she lectures medical students throughout their training, spearheading academic medicine initiatives that advance community outreach and the prevention of HIV and STIs.
With this wide-ranging expertise, Kogelman has a distinctive perspective on the ways in which college students can most effectively take charge of their own health (and so parents can allow them to). She sat down with Tufts Now to discuss her top tips.
Go to the Health Center First—and Stay Centralized
“For most student health concerns, the health center is usually the best and quickest way to get care,” Kogelman says.
Some college health centers, including the CCW, act as students’ primary care providers, according to Kogelman, and they’re well-equipped to address issues that most commonly affect students on campus, such as respiratory illnesses, mental health challenges, and sexually transmitted infections.
The CCW and some other college health centers also have the resources to support students with chronic health conditions. Such students might be accustomed to relying on parents or school nurses to manage tasks like monitoring glucose levels or remembering medications, and the health center can play a pivotal role in fostering independence. “We can offer the treatment and guidance students need, refer them to specialists when necessary, and provide effective patient education,” Kogelman explains.
Of course, she adds, if there’s an urgent issue—for example, a very high fever, extreme pain, or excruciating urinary symptoms—students should seek emergency medical attention. “But for many issues we can help them efficiently and direct them to additional care as needed,” she says.
Kogelman also emphasizes the importance of keeping care centralized within one system whenever possible. “Seeing multiple providers across different institutions can lead to fragmented care and miscommunication,” she says. “By using the campus health center as a hub, students ensure their healthcare providers have a complete picture of their medical history, making it easier to identify patterns and offer consistent support.”
“Sometimes students look for—and want—a medical explanation for the symptoms they’re experiencing, but often those symptoms occur because they’re simply not sleeping well, not eating well, burning the candle at both ends: just not taking care of themselves overall.”
Laura Kogelman
Take Small Steps for Big Health Gains
But many health-related concerns are not medical, Kogelman adds. “Sometimes students look for—and want—a medical explanation for the symptoms they’re experiencing, but often those symptoms occur because they’re simply not sleeping well, not eating well, burning the candle at both ends: just not taking care of themselves overall. We try to help students manage those basics.”
Doing so is first and foremost a matter of helping them see there are problems. “If we can get students to say, ‘Okay, I am sleeping only three hours a night, and that is going to have an effect on how I feel and my overall performance,’ we can start steering them toward better choices,” Kogelman says.
Those choices often can result in small changes that have a big impact. “Maybe they can choose to go to sleep an hour earlier despite their deadlines, or to have a salad instead of a burger and fries,” says Kogelman. It’s hard—or impossible—to make the healthiest choices every time, she acknowledges, but making them at least some of the time can have positive effects on overall wellbeing in the long run.
Get the Facts
While they’re at it, Kogelman suggests that students look closely at where their health-related information is coming from; it’s easy, otherwise, for every small discomfort to feel like a disaster. MedlinePlus and the National Institute of Aging have pages dedicated to educating patients on how to find trustworthy sources of medical information, she notes.
“Getting ‘information’ from a company advertising a product or an individual’s TikTok channel isn’t going to help you as much as finding credible sources and asking your doctors and nurses how the information you find might apply to you,” she says.
Info garnered through social media can be particularly deceptive. As Kogelman puts it: “It tends to be interesting and relatable, but that doesn’t mean that the same treatment or approach is right for you.”
Care Is a Two-Way Street
One of the biggest obstacles Kogelman sees in students’ approach to self-care is a failure to communicate responsibly about health concerns—or, more accurately, to communicate about them at all.
Often, she explains, “I’ll spend an hour with a patient and we’ll do a whole workup; I’ll order lab work, I’ll carefully go over everything I’m doing and the reasons I’m doing it, and I’ll tell them I’m going to send them a message through the portal once all results come in.”
But after she sends that message, she never hears back. “They don’t check portal messages, they don’t respond to phone calls, they ignore texts. Once an issue is no longer a concern in their minds, students often stop communicating with us.”
That’s a mistake, she says. “For us to be able to take care of students as well as we can, we need back-and-forth communication. It’s a partnership, and it’s important for students at this stage of life, as young adults, to learn how necessary it is to work together with their healthcare providers.”
Embrace Independence
The biggest message Kogelman would like to convey—and this one is largely for parents—is that college offers students an opportunity to achieve greater independence when it comes to their own health.
It can be challenging, she acknowledges, for parents to take a step back, but doing so allows their young-adult children to begin trusting their own judgment more, a key part of effective self-care. It also helps them gain experience with practical aspects of managing health: the ins and outs of insurance, scheduling appointments, and getting prescription refills.
“It’s a fine balance,” she says. “Of course, it’s great to offer support and let your kids know they can still rely on you when they have questions. But you also want to encourage them to reach out for medical attention on their own. The more they do so, the safer they’ll feel seeking help, and the more comfortable they’ll be making their own health-related choices.”
Health and Behavioral Health Resources
Additional information about the Collegiate Center for Wellness and other related resources is available on the Tufts University School of Medicine website.
Department:
Immunology