Category: Clara

It’s already the end of the summer and my practicum experience! I am proud of what I am finishing up for the United States Peace Corps in the Office of Global Health and HIV, a literature review and an implementation guide for Peace Corps Volunteers working towards the prevention of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drug use among adolescents.

Over the course of the summer, I have been contemplating how my personality interacts with public health work. As an anthropology major in college, I am accustomed to thinking on big-picture levels and I tend to come away with the “big idea” rather than with details. I’m used to thinking, “How can I make it as easy as possible for anyone, including myself, to take away the main point?” Sometimes, including in my projects for Peace Corps this summer, I have to remind myself that my work in public health has to cite specific research and statistics; the distinguishing mark of public health is that everything we do is grounded in evidence. As we have seen in the COVID pandemic, maintaining the credibility of the public health field is crucial to ensuring the public’s willingness to engage in health interventions.

One of the highlights of the summer was having

the opportunity to speak with a couple of Peace Corps posts (offices operating at the national level that receive Peace Corps Volunteers for their respective countries), including Moldova and Albania. Those meetings helped me focus my literature review because they gave me a better sense of the on-the-ground lens. I returned to my drafts after those meetings and realized some parts needed more specificity and others were irrelevant. I believe this is another important lesson in public health; one has to be able to operate on the community level while keeping the local level in mind. Ultimately, even though we work on a population level, we are still improving individual lives. I suspect I will continue to learn how to manage that balance throughout my public health career.

As I finish up with the Peace Corps, I am excited to start the final year of my Master of Public Health in Maternal, Child, and Family Health. I will be in this year’s cohort of the Mary Rose Tully Training Initiative to become an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. I will also continue an internship that I started this summer with the Gillings Humanitarian Health Initiative, for which I am on a team creating a research repository on infant and young child feeding in emergency settings (link: https://www.ennonline.net/ife/iycferepository). I am enormously grateful to Salwan, my supervisor at Peace Corps this summer, for her inspiring and patient mentorship and for renewing my interest in global health promotion.

Clara

Hi! My name is Clara and I’ve just finished the first year of my Master of Public Health in Maternal, Child, and Family Health at UNC. My summer practicum is a remote internship with the United States Peace Corps in the Office of Global Health and HIV. I am working with the Youth Health & Wellbeing Portfolio, for which I will produce two products over the course of the summer: 1) a literature review of best practices and recent developments in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drug (ATOD) prevention for adolescents, and 2) a guide for Peace Corps Volunteers to use when implementing ATOD prevention projects for youth at various Peace Corps posts around the world.

I have been interested in health education for a long time, and I am hoping that this summer will give me a better sense of direction as to whether I’d like to be working behind the scenes in health curriculum development, or directly delivering health education campaigns (or both!). This past year, I was a graduate assistant for Duke University’s Student Wellness Center, where I worked with a team to create sexual health education campaigns on campus. We also had the chance to provide some health education presentations at a local high school, the administrator of which told us that the time in school lost due to COVID had created a noticeable difference in the social development of young teenagers; we were asked to consider this as we delivered the content differently according to grade levels. I want to keep such effects of the pandemic under consideration as I work in youth health education this summer.

Some of the perks of this practicum are the conversations that I get to have with my coworkers about their work at Peace Corps. I sit in on the weekly meetings of my office so I can learn more about what my coworkers are doing. My preceptor also hopes to connect me with current volunteers in the field so that I can get a better perspective on the materials that I’m creating for them. I will admit, however, that Aristotle’s old adage, “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know,” is proving true when attempting to understand the structure of the behemoth organization that is Peace Corps.

One of the challenges I have had to confront in previous health education work was how to educate people about the consequences of certain health behaviors without further stigmatizing those who have already engaged in those behaviors. I look forward to continuing to navigate this challenge as I delve further into health education this summer.