Student Health 101 is a free, monthly online magazine offered by the counseling center that provides students with information about how to develop healthy habits while transitioning into adulthood.
“Students are coming to college without a lot of good information about health and wellness,” said Mina McVeigh, Alcohol and Drug Outreach Coordinator and ETSU’s original coordinator of Student Health 101.
“They don’t eat breakfast — that’s one of the biggest poor health decisions — they don’t sleep … a lot of people want to exercise, but they don’t really know much beyond that.”
The magazine provides students with information about healthy habits, such as eating a nutritious diet, developing strong relationships and learning how to budget finances.
It also provides students with resources at ETSU that promote the retention of healthy habits.
The counseling center pays for the rights to distribute the magazine to students, and it has the leeway to create six university-specific pages advertising the kinds of tools available for ETSU students. The school pays $5,000 per year to distribute the magazine to a maximum of 8,000 students.
About 6,600 students are signed up to receive the magazine and the site receives almost 1,000 hits per month.
The content of the magazine’s university-specific pages is decided by the university’s promotion committee, which is composed of numerous departments including representatives from the Department of Housing, the Sherrod Library and the Basler Center for Physical Activity.
McVeigh said the magazine’s nutrition segment is especially popular among students.
“Our students from our reader survey liked nutrition so much that we actually decided to have a nutrition intern,” McVeigh said.
Anna Clark, who is currently earning her Master’s in Clinical Nutrition at ETSU, has written several pieces for the magazine including an article exploring the caloric content of foods at Taco Bell.
“We try to do things that are applicable to our students right here,” McVeigh said.
“We are hoping for April that we’re going to have her do an article on traditional crock-pot recipes, because crock-pots are really hot right now.”
McVeigh said she was motivated to find an online educational tool for students when she noticed students giving little attention to handouts.
“When I first came here in 2011 the first thing I did was some of the wellness fairs and booth things; we were handing out paper and I noticed that students were just trashing the
