Katy's Final Reflection

I signed up for this class with a general interest in learning more about adolescents because they are a popular and yet very unique audience for public health interventions. So many programs targeting adolescent fail to engage them and promote behavior change because they don’t fully understand their view of the world, particularly health issues. At the same time, adolescence is a critical time when youth make decisions that can impact their future health. Although I have no specific intentions toward working with adolescents, I recognize that they have unique characteristics that set them apart from other commonly targeted populations. Developing my skills in working with adolescents will provide me with useful experience that I will likely put to good use throughout my career in public health.

This class has altered my outlook and helped me to change my expectations for my public health work. Having the experience of working in the real world and actually seeing individuals learn new things and accept them puts behavior change expectations in perspective. I aspire to work in communications and marketing which is inherently more of a desk job and you rarely get the opportunity to witness individuals taking in your messages. I think the workshops have helped me to more clearly understand how adolescents process health messages. Although I may not intend to work directly with adolescents in a workshop setting, the lessons I have learned and the experience I have gained will guide any communication and marketing materials I am a part of developing.

Ultimately, I think the best way to promote behavior change is to meet people where they are at. Because communication and marketing campaigns are not interpersonal forms of communication, they need to better understand how, why, and where adolescents will receive health information. This class and the workshops have helped me to better understand where adolescents are coming from and how they learn new health information.

Better understanding the unique characteristics of each population subgroup is something that is hard to do in the context of a graduate program but I feel that adolescents are a critical population that public health professionals must work to understand. For whatever population I may be working with in the future, this class has made me realize the importance of understanding them and the context in which they view the world in. This experience has shown me that the best and most reliable way of doing this is by interacting acting with them in their environment and showing that my interest is in truly understanding them in order to improve their health.