Welcome to our initiative to get as many students as possible exploring the benefits mindfulness and meditation within their academic journeys!
We encourage you to simply sit + breathe for a little bit of time everyday
and see how it might translate into your life.
Download the app Insight Timer and search for our group >>>
mindful scholar
We invite you to join the movement + conversation.
We’re super excited to have you!
Welcome! So glad you stopped by to see what Amanda 
and I are up to! After fifteen years of working with, supporting and encouraging low income, first generation and underrepresented students to pursue the Ph.D., I’m convinced that “health and wellness” is the missing piece in this often times convoluted and challenging puzzle called grad school. We expect students to thrive in academia, to give it their all, to become experts and thought leaders in their fields, but we don’t pay enough attention to the “whole being” during this process.
I started incorporating “wellness” into the conversation with our McNair scholars almost ten years ago now, which for me, meant exposing them to the benefits of yoga to help them deal with stress. It grew from there, morphing into our slogan EAT SLEEP MOVE and regularly checking in with one another on these very important areas of life. If we want to do our best work, I believe it starts with a foundation of wellness which ultimately turns into a foundation of STRENGTH.
Inner + outer strength.
Since developing my own meditation practice, I’ve come to understand that everything begins with mindfulness. Cultivating mindfulness has the potential to help ground students in ways unimagined. That’s exactly why I’m so excited to be connecting with one of our very special McNair scholar grads, Amanda Clark, to encourage students to explore mindfulness and meditation and see just how it might manifest in their lives and academic journeys.
It’s a beautiful thing to explore. And I hope you do.
Here’s to creating a strong + flourishing community of mindful scholars!
Be sure to follow Lynn’s journey
on her blog at >>>
Hi There! I’m Amanda, and I’m a graduate student in the chemical biology doctoral program at Harvard University. As a first-generation college student, my path into research was ignited by the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program at Central Michigan University (BS Biochemistry ’15). Deep down inside, I’m a massive nerd and am immensely passionate about pursuing translational cancer research at the interface of chemistry & biology. My journey with mindfulness meditation began at the end of my 3rd year of PhD. Grad school has the potential to be a liberating, inspirational time of life, but it seems easy to lose perspective of that and slip into one that feels stressful and ridden with anxiety. Mindfulness, and other forms of meditation, can bring balance back into your life. This prompted me share my own personal journey with mindfulness and to join Lynn Curry with her endeavors to create a “Mindful Scholar” movement.
Be sure to follow Amanda’s journey
on her blog at >>>
Mindful Path to PhD 