To open, I’d like to frame this piece around a disclaimer. I’m a 21-year old cis, white, middle-class undergraduate student studying in the city and country I grew up in. I am not a public health professional. I’m a student, and I’m always learning.
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As an undergrad at Saint Louis University, I’ve spent the past 3 and a half years of my life meticulously studying the annals of both public health and its field. Though I am keen to hazily-browsing various unrelated things on the internet for many classes throughout the past semesters, I certainly haven’t checked out.
From emergency management to preventing the spread of HIV, public health’s mission and breadth of action is gigantic. When people ask me what I want to do with this degree, I have no answer. I will never answer this question.
Perhaps the most salient structure within this degree is the knowledge that disaster isn’t unilateral. There is no equity in wrath, and harm put onto people has and will continue to importunately harm folks previously disadvantaged through structures of racism, classism, ableism, and misogyny.
Events metastasize to communities far beyond the immediate impact, and it’s up to public health to respond, reflect, act, communicate, and respond again. In public health, we discuss how to reduce the likelihood of disaster, how to care for those in them, and how to alleviate pain.
In public health, the entire language of change and progress fits into a feedback loop. The loop begins with an event, action, or intervention. After that, public health reflects. We think about how we responded, what it directly impacted and if the outcome met our goals.
Writing articles for this publication has been extensively time-consuming and difficult.
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Go back to the drawing board.
Question everything and talk about everything. Each thing you learn has pros and cons. Professors are not gods, and neither are you. We all exist within structures of punishment and reward. If you critique a professor or a style or a theory and get punished for it, take note of why something has been threatened by your thoughts. What is in place for it to be taken as wrong for you to speak?
If you act, think about why you did. If you abstain, think about what brought you there.
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It’s okay to feel.
Now, this lesson isn’t from anything I’ve learned from Public Health. However, school and academia consistently reinforce the value of the distanced researcher. This is impossible. It is impossible to not care about your work, especially if you’re working with people. Forgive yourself for caring. You are supposed to care. You are supposed to be human.
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Everything can apply.
Anything anyone has ever said in terms of a topic or story is credible. Listen more to an interview and a poem than to any datasheet or study. Do not act if it was not asked of you to act. Always listen. Know your privilege, and consistently think about the space you are taking up. People are people before they are hurt by any system or structure.
Math is not bad, but it’s not the most important thing to read. Public health is primarily about people. Center the stories of people, and use math to empower change.
What others have done is not irrelevant. Use the room as a sounding board. Ask for truth and honesty. Every public health action or intervention has it’s own story, and learning its story alone impacts yours.
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Read the room.
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We will constantly be critiquing the rooms that we are in. Before we shout for ourselves and each other, know who you are speaking to, and who will hear it. Words create a butterfly effect, and public health advocates set the wingspan for each and every intervention.
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You will not learn what you want to learn.
I don’t know what I have learned from this degree. I now understand the structures of flora and what autotrophism is. I do not need to know these things. I don’t know what they will do to help me. But I learned not only random facts and theories in other classes but how to engage with new structures of knowledge.
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You won’t know what you learned for a long time.
Sitting in class is boring. Many times, professors don’t want students to debate and engage with the material and with each other in class. This is frustrating, especially since the entire ethic behind public health is teamwork and collaboration for the common good. Maybe what we learned here is to sit in frustrating structures, and to question what we can do with them.A good thing must change to remain good.
We assume that things that are good do not need to change. This is wrong. Everything good must continue to reflect and grow as the world changes around us.
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Go back to the drawing board.
And we’re back to this one. Everything we go towards comes from what we’ve been through. In any project, lesson, or life experience, we are constantly thinking about where we go from the point of contact. We rarely discuss why we got here, and what processes took us to this place. Reflect on change and impact and intention. Continue acting and thinking.
Next semester, I will be graduating with a degree in public health. Though I’ve launched into theories and structures and advocacy, maybe the most important skill set I have learned through undergrad has been the response to the action and inaction.
What have we learned? What do you want to learn?
Practice speaking, listening, and reworking drawing board.