Background
Medical school comes with many responsibilities and stressors. The stress from school and everyday life significantly affects medical students’ mental health; especially those that do not know how to handle stress in a healthy way. Previous studies have shown that implementing a mindfulness program has decreased student burnout and overall stress levels. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of our unique mindfulness-based training program for first year medical students, MeditateMD. The program is a 14-week program that teaches mindfulness techniques like meditation to better equip first year students with the tools they need to handle their new stressful environment.  

Methods
Pre-experimental design and quantitative research methods were used for the study. The students were recruited using a convenience sampling technique and 8 first year Mercer University School of Medicine students participated. All participants were given a pre-training Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) to determine their starting level of stress and confidence in handling it.  

Results
After the training the students received another PSS and an evaluation of the training. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed and found that there was a statistically significant decrease in stress and the post-training evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive. Students overall thought the course was helpful and worth their time and energy.  

Conclusion
This study indicated that a mindfulness-based training program increases medical students’ ability to cope with stress. Comparison between the pre and post training stress levels were significant, and showed that the mindfulness techniques taught by the integrated program were helpful in reducing stress and increasing confidence in their ability to cope with stress