Starting this academic year, students in Boston College's public service program PULSE will be able to serve at the Tufts-New England Medical Center (Tufts-NEMC) in a new partnership between the institutions.
PULSE is a course at Boston College (BC) in which students study classic philosophical texts about citizenship and then devote 10 hours a week to working in a public service institution. Tufts-NEMC will now join 55 other institutions as a choice for students looking for a service placement.
There was "a lot of interest" in Tufts-NEMC among the students, said Meg Femino, the Emergency Department disaster coordinator at Tufts-NEMC. She expects to choose about four students to work with her this year and has already met interested students, she said.
Volunteers will most likely be supporting Emergency Department staff by helping facilitate patient reception and sitting with patients waiting to be
treated.
They will also be working on several special projects during the school year, including a homelessness outreach project, a tobacco cessation project, and a flu vaccination awareness campaign. The students will also be helping Femino to assemble a disaster response team, Director of the PULSE program David McMenamin said.
Tufts-NEMC was considered a good fit for the PULSE program because, although "many students have interest in medical-related placements," PULSE only had one other placement in the medical field prior to this one, McMenamin said. Also, he pointed out that Tufts-NEMC serves large amounts of the homeless and immigrants. "We want our students to have experience with these populations," he said.
Kajahl Valipour, member of the PULSE council, a group of students that examines prospective partner institutions, said that Femino was a large factor in their decision as well. "A big part of our program is supervision, since the supervisor needs to be at the site and actually gives grades," said Valipour. "We loved Meg Femino for this position; she really seemed to understand what the program is about."
PULSE's combination of social service and philosophical learning is meant to show students the meaning of social responsibility, McMenamin said. "We get our students by their immersion in the community to think about what it means to be a member of a community in a larger scale and what that responsibility brings upon them," he said.
Valipour agrees that "they're studying what it means to be a good person and they'll see this relationship between what they're studying and what they see when they work." In her own experience, she said, PULSE "opened my eyes" to the responsibility to help those born into less favorable conditions than she.
Femino hopes that working at Tufts-NEMC will give other allow other students to have the same realization. "I really think this will encompass social responsibility and helping others," she said.
