I am back in North Carolina from Eldoret, Kenya! Wow, what an incredible experience. I was able to complete my practicum work, see the hospital system, and go on safari! It was so valuable to see how the health system in Kenya is different from the health system in North Carolina. Ultimately, I know that the work I did was meaningful and helpful to the people of Kenya. I was able to meet so many wonderful people and develop so many friendships along the way. I know that it wouldn’t have been possible without support from UNC.
In addition to the meaningful work, I was able to spend some time going for hikes at Kessup Falls, see the city of Eldoret and Umbrella Falls, attend seminars of how to attain a career in global health, see most of the Big 5 animals on safari, and learn how to navigate the rain forest and call in various birds!
It has been such an incredible summer to end my first year of MPH work. I am so excited to see what this next year will bring at Gillings.
Hi everyone! My name is John Shusko, and I am a Master of Public Health candidate on a Global Health track at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. I wrote a blog post at the beginning of my practicum, and now I wanted to discuss the closeout of my practicum and how the experience has benefitted my overall MPH.
This photo was taken at the State Emergency Operations Center in Raleigh – one of many important emergency management facilities I was able to tour during my internship!
I am completing my practicum at the UNC Office of Emergency Management and Planning (OEMP). I have had two main projects and a few smaller projects during my internship. My main project this summer has been to research frameworks for an end-of-year emergency management report that UNC-Chapel Hill can adopt in the future. I recently presented these findings via an oral presentation to the entire office, as well as representatives from Orange County Office of Emergency Management, and a few UNC officials.
My other main project has been looking at other partner institutions’ experiences with conducting a hazard assessment. I reached out to these schools via a Qualtrics survey I created and produced a report with my findings.
My two deliverables that I will present to the MPH Practicum team at Gillings will be the presentation from my first main project and the report/survey for my second main project.
Over the past 10 weeks, I have had the opportunity to shadow experienced emergency managers and other professionals in the field to understand how emergency management works at the University level. (The short answer: lots of teamwork, collaboration across departments, and ample training and planning during “blue sky” days). I have visited facilities both on and off campus that are essential to effective emergency management at our university and got to meet the essential personnel that staff these facilities. I was fortunate to tour the State of North Carolina’s Emergency Operations Center in Raleigh, and chatted with emergency managers for Orange County, among many people I met.
These relationships will continue well beyond my summer internship, and having this internship has introduced me to the field of emergency management that goes beyond the classroom. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity I have had and the people I have met and look forward to returning to my last year at Gillings in the fall!
As my practicum experience is gradually coming to a close, I can’t help but reflect on my experience so far, looking back at where I started from and the growth I have experienced. After a few mishaps regarding my approach to make sense of the data I was tasked with analyzing, I found myself thinking back to my boy scout days when our instructor would always remind us to “begin with the end in mind”.
I have learnt a great deal from this experience, including the importance of planning, understanding the goals of the work that needs to be done, and fashioning an approach that adequately answers the questions that need answering before starting to work. I have also learned what goes into planning and execution of a study, and important considerations to be made in planning and implementing public health work. Most importantly, I learned a lot about myself and how necessity forces growth.
Despite being a mostly remote experience, I was fortunate to have an accessible preceptor that provided guidance and resource persons that could help at different stages of the work we were doing, making my experience much less difficult than it could have been. I am also glad to have met other members of the organization I worked for and made some friends along the way, many of whom have contributed in some way to my experience so far. Having bagged these additional skills, I look forward to applying them in future public health work and in other spheres of my life.
