The best transition ever

Here are six pieces of advice for SPH students getting ready to graduate this year:

1) Stay open to possibilities: While in school, you are exposed to lots of subject areas through your class work and on-campus lectures. Stay open to the possibility of discovering a new area of interest - the more open-minded you are, the more job opportunities you'll find.
2) Do as many informational interviews as possible: The next six months are a great opportunity for you to network and learn from leaders in your interest area. Professionals are surprisingly happy to talk to students, so go out there and find out where the potential jobs are!
3) Hone your skills: Employers will be looking to see what you can contribute to the organization. Take time to learn new computer programs, get a certification in project management, etc. This won't take very much time, but will make you more marketable.
4) Take a class outside the school of public health: There are diminishing returns to taking a lot of classes in the same subject area. Go outside the SPH to learn about a different discipline's perspective.
5) Enjoy yourself: Spend time with other students and at on-campus events. You'll want to have lots of great memories of your time at Berkeley.
6) Take a break: Once you start working, it'll be hard to take a big chunk of time off. When you land a job, try to negotiate for starting well after graduation, and take some time to do something you've been dreaming about!

My Action Learning Project

For my action learning project, I’m working with Professor David Graves in the UC Berkeley Ambient Gas Plasma Lab.

The AGP lab is developing a small medical device that can be used to prevent infection and promote wound healing. Professor Graves has hired me to look into the business and operational aspects of launching this device in the developing world. This will include exploring issues like intellectual property strategy, production strategy, barriers to adoption by medical professionals. We hope to come up with as many ideas as possible to help in the implementation of this device.

The project is just beginning. The goal is to gather as much information as possible, through internet research, case studies, and interviews with people who are more experienced in this field. The more ideas we generate that can be used when the project is launched, the better.

I hope to learn more about all the aspects of launching a new health technology. I look forward to researching what has done in the past to help healthcare providers become comfortable using new devices. Through this project I will make contacts in the medical device/international health field, and hope to learn from my interviews with them.

There’s a lot to look forward to in this project. I like the freedom I have to explore whichever aspects of this project interest me, and I like being able to learn about many different aspects of launching a device in a developing country.

There are a lot of challenges, though. I’m very much on my own with this project – the professor has never done anything like this himself. It is up to me to structure my work, and to keep this as a priority.

At this stage in the project, my main questions are on how to go about finding the information I need, how to organize my progress, and how to make the most of my interviews. Any advice from the fellows community would be very much appreciated!

at the VA

Hi All,

Hope you're doing well! Happy to say that this summer has been pretty laid back with plenty of exploration.

When I first got to work, I was encouraged to visit/shadow all the departments in the hospital that I'm interested in. So, I've spent a day with an outreach team in their mobile health care van, gotten a tour of the pharmacy department and their pill-dispensing robots,etc, and talked to a lot of interesting people in general. I also got to participate in a three-day LEAN process improvement workshop.

I'm applying what I learned about LEAN to a project to improve the Occupational Therapy department's workspace. The OT department has stockpiled equipment (like raised toilet seats and scooters) in their workspace because they cannot depend on the Prosthetics department reliably delivering the equipment they need for patients. The result - the patient gym doubles as a warehouse - not ideal. So I'm teaming up with the OTs and the prosthetics department to improve the way equipment is requested and stored.

I'm also working on a project to rewrite the hospital's inter-facility transfer policy. Moving a patient from one hospital to another (for a needed procedure, or even just because of space issues) involves so many people and departments that it's just been a nice excuse for me to go out and meet people (and learn the lingo they use!)

Well, I'm looking forward to catching up with you all in person, enjoy your weekend,
Santhi

Technology in my daily life

Decisions, Decisions...

I will be doing my internship at the VA hospital in Palo Alto. The VA is a good fit for me because two of my main health interests are mental health and disability, two areas in which the VA offers a lot of services, given its population's needs. I'll most likely be working on their "Patient and Family Centered Care" initiative. I'd like to see how the team I'm working with goes about changing the way clinicians relate to their patients.

While I'm there, I just want to get a good feel for the hospital environment. I want to make the time to interview and shadow people in as many departments and roles as possible and sit in a lot of meetings. If I do this, and if I make real contributions to the project, I'll consider it a successful summer.

Deciding what to do this summer was a challenge for me. I really had to think about what was important to me in a summer internship. Mentoring? Future job opportunities? Exposure to an industry in which I don't plan to work? Fun? Confronting trade-offs and making decisions under uncertainty is an important leadership ability to develop, and the internship process was great practice!

Digital Storytelling Video

We like prevention......right?

Here's the story:

Project Prevention is an organization that pays an incentive of $300 to drug users to get sterilized or go on long-term birth control. The project was started by Barbara Harris, who adopted four babies from the same drug-addicted woman. After watching the newborns go through withdrawal after they were born, she decided to take action....and this is the action she chose to take.

Part of her rationale is that having unwanted, drug-exposed babies is harmful to a woman's self-esteem. Another part of it is that the children are a burden on the system - according to the the Project's website, 80% of newborns whose mothers are illicit drug users go straight from the hospital to foster care.

I think that because this is an extreme case, it forces us to confront all sorts of issues in public health ethics. Sure, this is cost-effective, but is it social engineering? And no doubt many women use the incentive money to pay for drugs. Is the incentive coercive, given their addiction and need for money? But what if it is true (as the organization claims) that this incentive is the "nudge" that people need to do something that they know is the right thing for themselves? And there are many more questions that a program like this raises.

If you want to learn more, google the organization - there are lots of opinions out there.


Controversial enough for you?

Recipe for success

What do you think are the key skills leaders in public health need in order to be successful, and why? What skills are you most interested in developing over the course of the fellows program?
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Sometimes I am intimidated by the number of skills that public health leaders need to have. Like leaders in every field, it helps to be persuasive, charismatic, and wise. They must be good at negotiating, good at settling disputes, and competent in their content area. These are particularly important because public health leaders tend to work with so many different stakeholders.

But, perhaps most importantly, leaders have to get a lot of work done every day, especially when they are overseeing a large teams that need to ask them questions in order to move projects forward. I am amazed by how many emails people answer, how many meetings they are able to participate in, in the span of one day. I really want to learn how to do this, to work on my time management skills, and my ability to work quickly and efficiently. Another skill that's important to me is organization. I am not naturally an organized person, but have put systems into place for myself in order to manage my calendar, my files, etc. But often these systems do not fit my needs well. I guess I'd like to see how other people organize themselves, and learn from this.

I also want to work on my networking skills. I sometimes go to networking events, but then do not feel like talking to anyone at all. Even though I like talking to people, I feel nervous about approaching people, worried that I'll ask them boring, irrelevant questions. Somewhat related - I'd like to work on my interpersonal skills in general. Though I don't feel like I'm socially awkward, I feel that this is an area that is so critical for success, I'd like to focus on it. In particular, I'd like to get better at sensing how others are feeling, and responding appropriately.

Digital Storytelling

What a great activity to start off the Fellows program!

The time flew - it was thrilling to know that we'd be assembling the entire story in a day. I kept thinking about how different the process of making a digital story would've been even five years ago - the software had so many easy-to-use features, it took just minutes to overlay a soundtrack using Jamendo, and we recorded our voices on Ipods, which are a basically a household item these days.

As we discussed at the workshop, new media is decentralizing the arts. I think it's great that the barriers to creating and "publishing" art are lower now. And I do believe that Digital Storytelling will be a useful public health tool. This is a compelling medium for marginalized populations and advocates to use to share their experience. I especially like the juxtaposition of photography and narrative - people can choose to keep one element literal and the other figurative (or any other combination!)

After the workshop, I thought about how everybody has had experiences that you'd never imagine they've had. This general concept used to be central to my worldview (especially when I listened to "This American Life" all the time!) but I hadn't thought about it in a while.

We learned a lot about each other over those two days - if not for the workshop, we may have never have heard those stories.

Back to school...

My winter break was great. By the end I had forgotten what it feels like to have a schedule and responsibilities. One highlight is that I saw the elephant seals in San Simeon. Every winter they settle onto the California coast to mate and give birth, and what a sight! Hundreds of blubbery, beautiful seals nestled together, just 10 feet away from Highway 1.

The start of this semester feels very different than the start of the last one. I remember starting last fall frenetically trying to figure out which career trajectory I wanted to focus on – I thought it would be important to do this to get the most out of the program. This semester I’m more laid back. I see that most skills are transferable from one industry to another, so I’m focusing on gathering these general skills and absorbing as much public health as I can.

Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, is a leader who inspires me. Canada had a strong vision: he drew a line around a poor 24-block neighborhood in Harlem and vowed that all the children born in the neighborhood would graduate from high-school, because he would build a web of programs and resources so supportive that they couldn’t fall through it. His programs have been enormously successful . I admire Geoffrey Canada as a leader because he has an inspiring yet concrete vision. An important lesson to learn from his example is that as a leader you can set expectations very high if you also give a community the resources it needs to succeed.