This past year, Adam and I piloted the health literacy project at our first Cincinnati Public School. Our goal was to give refugee students a foundational understanding of the many intricacies of the field of healthcare in hopes that they would be able to apply this knowledge in order to assist their families. What we didn’t account for were the obstacles that we would face on the way such as navigating teaching during a pandemic and explaining such an intimidating system in simple terms. Although these obstacles were frustrating at the moment, they have made my overall experience so much more meaningful. I was able to think creatively in order to come up with unique solutions to each of the obstacles such as finding virtual games in order to keep students engaged throughout the class.
One of the biggest impacts this experience had on me was shining light on my love for teaching and health education. Previously, I could never see myself becoming a teacher but after the first day of our health literacy classes I instantly knew that this was something very special and something that I was good at. I enjoyed everything from developing the lesson plans and curriculum to executing it and interacting with my students. I found my excitement building up throughout the week, awaiting Friday mornings when I could talk to my students again. My newfound love for education motivated me to look into potential education minors and to my surprise UC had the perfect options. I found a health education and promotion minor which was offered through the College of Education and immediately signed up to take an introductory class the following semester.
While the honors experience was only supposed to last till the end of first semester, the pilot program was so successful that we decided to continue into the following semester with a larger group of refugee students and actually implementing our research study this time. The research study was composed of a pre/post survey which was administered through redcap and would tell us how effective our curriculum was. Second semester, we taught a total of three classes instead of just one for the full 8 week curriculum. However this time our experience was even more enjoyable than the first semester because we had worked out all the kinks in our curriculum and reflected on what went well and what we could improve on. One issue that we ran into our second semester was getting students to fill out the pre/post survey since it was required to be optional. In the future, we hope to teach in-person so that we can assist the students with any technological issues they may run into while filling out the survey.
After the program ended second semester, I was able to present our work and findings at the UC Undergraduate Research Symposium. This experience gave me the opportunity to work on my presentation skills and communicate what work we had done and what we were planning on doing in the future. It was also amazing to watch all of our peers' presentations on a variety of topics ranging from basic science research to archaeology. Additionally, we were able to use our findings and experience in order to submit an abstract to the North American Refugee Health Conference. Although we’re not sure if our abstract was accepted yet, I’m grateful for the opportunity to apply to unique experiences like this and hopefully more in the future.
After completing this experience, I felt slightly confused about my future because I had always known that I wanted to become a physician and work in the medical field. However, this experience has opened up my eyes to the broad range of careers outside of just medicine that also involve health education. Although my end goal is still to become a physician, I'm excited to explore this new avenue of health promotion more closely and find opportunities that can get me more experience in the field of teaching.