PHILADELPHIA (BRN) – Graduate students are a unique mission field. Fifty percent of students who begin a Ph.D. program drop out before graduation, and 43% of doctoral students indicate that they experience more stress than they can handle.
Graduate students are 20 times more likely to consider suicide than the general population! These statistics are courtesy of gradresources.org, a campus-based ministry intentionally trying to serve all 2.9 million graduate and professional students in the United States. There are tremendous felt needs among these students.
Graduate student life at Drexel University is no different. This spring, the Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF) partnered with the CAF (Christian Academic Fellowship), our faculty Bible study, to engage these issues with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The primary speaker was Dr. Mary Ann Zimmer, a Christian nursing professor at Drexel and a member of Willow Grove Baptist Church, who received her Ph.D. this year at the age of 60. Her story encouraged students to honestly evaluate what success and failure look like. She led us through the ups and downs over the decades of her life, with great accomplishments and heartbreaking setbacks. Through it all, God showed Himself to be faithful.
Her twenty-minute talk focused on the idea that success can be defined in many different ways. Afterwards, the students gathered around tables with other Christian faculty members to discuss a series of questions on success and failure.
I joined one of three tables that included Mary Ann; Zaira, a student working on her master’s in molecular medicine; Samuel, a Nigerian international Ph.D. student in environmental engineering; Anni, a student who we met for the first time during the event; and Diana, another campus minister from the Methodist tradition. It was a fabulous conversation made better with food.
The highlight of the event was in the partnerships. As I said before, the GCF has an ongoing partnership with the CAF, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. We also partnered with Diana and Open Door Christian Community, which is a ministry of the United Methodist Conference of Eastern Pennsylvania. They provide a meal to approximately 100 students on campus each week.
Through an evangelism grant from the Baptist Resource Network (BRN), we helped offset the cost of their weekly meal in exchange for them providing and cooking us a portion of that meal in time for our event. It was a win for everybody involved.
We got a good meal without much work, Open Door was able to connect with other students and the Ph.D. students who often have trouble accessing healthy food on the stipends they receive learned about a weekly meal that is available to them throughout the year.
That is not everyone that helped with the event. Many administrators understand the nature of graduate student life and that graduate students are drastically underserved on campuses, especially campuses that are primarily focused on undergraduates. With that said, several Drexel administrators and offices went out of their way to help promote the event for us.
Both the Drexel Graduate College and the office of International Students and Scholars Services promoted the event on their Instagram accounts. Drexel Counseling let their students know about it. A friend of mine, who is a graduate student advisor in the business school, advertised the event to her connections. I’m not sure this affected attendance, but it let students know that there is a Christian group on campus that wants to help them. And it let the university administration know that there is a Christian group on campus that cares about graduate students if they need to refer someone.
Youngdai, a Korean international Ph.D. student in marketing, and the vice president of GCF, was overjoyed at the end of the event. It was the first major event he helped facilitate as part of the group’s leadership team. He loved being able to provide a quality conversation about success and failure in light of the gospel that was beneficial to his peers. The success of this event encouraged him to build on the momentum for the future.
Brian Musser, the Baptist Campus Minister at Drexel University, is a self-funded missionary through the North American Mission Board (NAMB), along with all the other Baptist Campus Ministers in Pennsylvania and South Jersey. His salary is entirely dependent upon the generous gifts of churches and individuals. If you are interested in becoming a financial partner in his ministry, please visit: missionaries.namb.net/full/brian-musser.
