By Catherine Anger

Lyman Briggs College (LBC), Michigan State University’s science-focused residential college, has long been a home for community-engaged students and registered student organizations. This year, one senior seminar course piloted a community-engaged learning experience with a local hospice care facility as part of its discussion on the ethics surrounding aging and the end of life.

Daniel Thiel, Ph.D., is a professor in LBC whose courses focus on the intersection of health and society. At the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities conference, Thiel learned from Eli Schupe, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, how she implemented companionship volunteering with hospice patients in her bioethics course. This inspired Thiel to create his own seminar in spring 2025 on aging, death, and dying, which included an opportunity for student volunteers to provide emotional support to patients and their families.

“We’re not doing anything clinical as companionship volunteers, but we are doing something very humane,” says Thiel. “You’re not racing around to treat an illness anymore. There is a fair amount of downtime [for hospice patients], so the company can be quite welcome.”

Reading and discussions often centered on end-of-life decision making, the history of nursing homes and other end-of-life health institutions, and different cultural perspectives on hospice. By posing questions ahead of volunteer experiences, Thiel aims for students to apply an open mindset to these different historical and cultural perspectives that they could bring back to in-class discussion.

“Most medical students don’t have a minute to sit and think and process, so we’re doing it ahead of time,” Thiel says. Most of the students, known in LBC as Briggsies, who took this course were preparing for medical school, for which they can include experiences like companionship volunteering on their applications. “We’re getting them ahead of the game so they can have some mental architecture for fitting that all into place.”

After navigating their site’s onboarding process and receiving Transportation Support Award (TSA) funding from CCEL, Thiel’s students each completed their semester with around 5 hours of companionship volunteering with Heartland Hospice in Okemos. Thiel has expressed an interest in continuing to build courses around community engagement experiences that explore other philosophical areas in health and connect Briggsies with a wide range of community partners. Based on his experience with this pilot group of students, Thiel adds that he is “quite convinced that this will be a valuable part of Briggsies’ education” moving forward.