In spring 2025, Lyman Briggs College students enrolled in a senior seminar on aging, death and dying. Taught by LBC science and society faculty member Daniel Thiel, the course was designed to extend learning into real-life settings. The course asked students to take what they were discussing in class into a hospice facility, where they would serve as companionship volunteers.
In his first two years of teaching in LBC, Thiel observed that many students were pre-med or pre-health majors and listed extensive hours of volunteering and shadowing on their resumes. He also noted that few had spent much time reflecting on personal growth that happened during those volunteer experiences. He writes, "I had the impression that the volunteering is all part of a well-laid out blueprint that our students are following (commendably!), but that there was a missed opportunity to try to make meaning out of these experiences and to integrate them into their education and growth overall."
“At the beginning of the semester, I was excited and felt well prepared for this course. I had worked in veterinary medicine for years, where end-of-life care was a regular part of my role, and I'd earned my EMT license and spent hours in emergency rooms and ambulances seeing people near death.
“I was intrigued by the idea of taking a class that would be solely focused on the end of life and dying with a service-based, hands-on component in the form of partnered hospice volunteering. I was curious about the perspectives of other students, and I wondered what I would learn through volunteering.
“My volunteer experience in the class was not as I had predicted. My partner and I were assigned a patient, and true to the uncertain nature of dying and hospice (and college), we were only able to meet with our patient twice for an hour and a half each time.
“Our patient was older and living with dementia. By all physical accounts, he seemed healthy. He was able to dress and feed himself, moved freely and easily around his apartment and facility, held conversations with us, and never seemed to be in any pain. We asked him about his life, and he was able to tell us stories of his years. He, like many in his generation, had enlisted in the military out of high school and had seen combat. He'd returned home, gotten married, had children and worked until he retired.
“As we talked with him, he would switch between ages or timelines. For a few minutes we would be speaking to him as a retiree in hospice, and a moment later we were speaking to him as a soldier in his late teens or early twenties, trying to decide whether to re-up or return home.
“This experience, both in-class and hands-on, taught me a lot about the variability of end-of-life and hospice care. Prior to this experience, I had thought of hospice as a last resort or a way to return home to die as opposed to dying in a hospital. I had images of someone bedridden and wasting away, not the man I met with. Through reading and hearing from the hospice's medical director, I learned that hospice is much more fluid and variable than I had thought.
“I started working in a Medical ICU a couple months after taking this class and have interacted with more patients on hospice, making the decision to pursue hospice, or simply making the decision to withdraw care in the hospital, which further broadened my understanding and view of it. My grandfather was put on hospice six months after my experience in this class and his path was the opposite of the patient I volunteered with. His reasons for pursuing hospice care were all physical and his mind remained sharp until his death earlier this summer. Seeing his experience furthered my understanding of the variability of hospice care, its applications, and the blessing it can be.
“I started medical school this year and I absolutely think LB 492 helped me in my journey to becoming a physician. The volunteering experience, class discussion, as well as the in-class readings, "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande in particular, have helped to prepare me for tough conversations as a physician and helping patients through those difficult decisions.”
“Throughout my undergraduate education, I took 35 different courses, varying in discipline, format, and intellectual demand. Very few courses leave a lasting imprint on how a student understands the world, themselves, and others. As a recent graduate and now medical student, I can identify LB 492 as one of the few courses.
“Before taking this course, my understanding of death was shaped by reflection and by a framework that treated mortality as inevitable, meaningful, and shared rather than something to be denied or avoided. These ideas were present in how I thought about life, but they remained largely internal and conceptual. This course gave those ideas a human context. Through proximity to someone approaching the end of life, I vicariously encountered what it means to live in the presence of an approaching end, and what had once been abstract became something relational and real.
“The patient I worked with was living with advanced dementia, and no two visits felt the same. Despite seeing her weekly, each encounter felt like meeting a different version of her. Some days she smiled easily and responded when I asked about her family, while other days she struggled to find words or seemed frustrated by her confusion. Over time, I began to see that decline does not follow a straight or predictable path, and that stability cannot be assumed even from one week to the next.”
“This experience in Dr. Thiel's class has been incredibly meaningful. As a student pursuing a career in healthcare, my understanding of death and hospice has evolved significantly through coursework, patient interactions and reflective discussions.
“While many of my previous courses were centered on the strict physiological processes of the body, this class served as an eye-opening reminder of the essential qualities that healthcare providers should embody: empathy, compassion, and an understanding of the human experience beyond just the physical. Initially, I approached healthcare with a focus on curing, managing, and reversing illness. However, this mindset can overlook the reality that every person must face: death.
“The exploration of death in the course was meaningful and transformative. It helped me understand death not as a failure, but as a natural and meaningful stage of life. Interactions with hospice patients and families taught me how to approach patients in end-of-life care and converse about this delicate and sensitive topic.
“Over the course of about five hours together, my volunteering partner and I formed a bond with our hospice patient. Every time we entered the facility, we would find our patient sitting at the dining room table, seemingly lost in thought. But her face would light up when she saw us, and in that moment, I understood how much presence and consistency can matter.
“We tried various activities to brighten her day including board games, making clay figurines, and her favorite, painting her nails. More than anything, our patient enjoyed talking with us. Some days, she expressed frustration at not remembering the names of objects. Other days, she would tear up with sadness, worried that family and friends no longer came to visit.
“Even within the limited number of visits with our patient, we came to know her fondness for sweets, iced lattes, soda and her habit of generously offering us bites of her food. Though she didn't always remember my name, she remembers the activities we shared, and that connection meant everything to me.”
In 2023, Thiel attended a meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and was particularly inspired by a course design by Eli Shupe, of the University of Texas at Arlington. Shupe had developed an introductory bioethics course that involved community-engaged learning and reflection. Thiel recognized that Shupe's approach could encourage LBC students to process and reflect on their volunteering experiences. He writes, "I developed my course in large part as an experiment to see if a community engaged learning-focused senior seminar could make a difference in helping students to build a stronger sense of meaning and purpose out of their altruism."
The course involved intensive planning and coordination across campus, including securing a transportation support award, working with the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and a connection with LBC alum Jeffrey VanWingen, LBC Class of 1993, who served as medical director of a local hospice provider, Heartland Hospice.
“Despite all the effort and planning, we faced many anticipated (and some unanticipated) logistical challenges,” Thiel writes. “I was incredibly grateful for the goodwill and enthusiasm of the students in the course to weather these challenges.”
Jang writes, “Through this class and our time volunteering with hospice patients, I learned that end-of-life care is not just about easing physical pain. It's about recognizing and respecting the human presence and dignity that endures in every moment. I will forever cherish the moments with our patient and continue to embrace these learning experiences in the future.”
This story originally appeared on the Lyman Briggs website.