Rachel's Final Post

The phrase “Spread love, not HIV,” will stay with me for a long time; I think we identified a future marketing exec yesterday. One of the biggest impacts this class had on me was the positive experience I had working with my peers. Everyone had excellent and different ideas for the workshop, and I learned a lot from both Tiffany and Andrea. This experience was definitely a case where the team’s work was so much better than any one person’s would have been. Learning the different techniques for facilitating discussions was fabulous. I have facilitated and participated in many marketing focus groups, system design and strategic visioning meetings in the past and WISH the facilitators (and myself) had had incorporated some of these techniques. I think this experience will help me as I work with others in the professional space as well.

I was surprised how little I knew about STI’s testing and treatment (Why don’t we learn more about that in an MPH program?) and how important it is to know your subject when talking to a group of people. It’s not just going to be something you remember for a test – it’s real and live and they’re going to remember it or question you. As a health professional, I realize I have A LOT more to learn.

Personally, I really enjoyed getting a better glimpse into how hard the work of public health promotion can be. Sara’s and Alis’ sharing of their own experiences was also great because it wasn’t anything theoretical.

Big marketing campaigns (even though there’s rarely the kind of money for that) rarely make a difference. The change happens slowly and on such a personal level. I know this sounds obvious but working with the teen groups reinforced for me how personal health is and how much our peers influence what we do. As adults we shed some of the self-consciousness of peer pressure but not entirely. As a society we adopt common behaviors and practices without knowing consciously that we are doing it and sometimes we lose control over our ability to do things. Working with the teenagers was great because they were, in a way, less conscious than adults and a lot of what they said was unfiltered.



Career wise, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing, but I was attracted to the field of public health because of the potential to impact people’s health in a positive way through education and programs. This class reinforced that I want to work with people not computers or numbers or books. I guess there will be a balance that I have to strike because no job is perfect, but I hope I can incorporate some program development and promotion into my career. As I mentioned yesterday, my father is a psychoanalyst and had been a social worker as well. I saw in his work, a joy he had for working with people. He didn’t sit in front of a computer all day snickering at people through email (as I did in my last job). I have, for too long, lacked that personal connection to the work of humanness. I now hope to do more work with teens rather than in the field of maternal and child health because I think there’s a lot less focus on teenagers but it’s such a critical time in one’s life.

Lastly, I hope I always learn by doing. The workshops were fantastic practical experience – nothing we could have gotten from the class and I hope that whatever career path I follow I challenge myself to continue learning.