reflection 1

Though a health policy student, I enjoy taking classes in other disciplines to gain a better understanding about how all of the functions within public health work together. Promotion specifically interests me because I enjoy studying about what motivates people to make changes in their lives. It’s a key aspect of any effort to effect positive change in an area of public health. It’s my impression that adolescent health is relatively underdeveloped from an outreach, research and funding perspective yet adolescence is a key time in ones life where new positive and negative behaviors are adopted and where there is real opportunity for impact. Promotion of health behaviors with teens is so interesting because they hear messages from various sources (peers, parents, teacher, popular media) and their trust of those sources differs as well.

Any career in public health requires the ability to communicate with individuals and population groups. I would also like to improve my understanding of the promotion and education development processes so that I can participate in promotion activities throughout my career. I hope to work with adolescents in some capacity throughout my public health career. This summer I am beginning a job with the Center for Health and Health Care in schools, and I believe this class will assist me in this job as well.

Let's face it. I'm pretty out of touch with teenagers - no facebook page, never been to my space. Feeling old. So I need to learn how to connect with adolescents by listening to them. While there isn’t much that I think I know about what motivates and interests teens these days, I have some marketing skills that might come in handy. I spent several years working in the marketing department of a company where we researched in focus groups and through data analysis our target group and what motivated them in order to develop appropriate messaging to them. Clearly our target in this class will be different but maybe some of the fundamentals of market research won’t be too different. I also don’t typically fear speaking in front of groups or facilitating focus groups though 15 year olds are a little scary to me.