Student Perspectives: School of Public Health

My name is Adam Kline and I am a senior from Lexington, Kentucky. Early on during my freshman year, my academic advisor suggested that I take one of the Introductory Public Health courses. Soon after, I knew it would be my primary major at Tulane. There were a ton of reasons—though most I didn’t discover until later—that public health was the right fit for me, but foremost was my belief that preventative health care works best. Public health builds on this idea by training students in-depth on different parts of the broad spectrum that is preventative health. This includes everything from epidemiology and biostatistics to infectious disease biology and intervention policy. These concepts are reinforced outside of the classroom by working in the New Orleans community through service learning and other health related organizations.

My sophomore year service learning project was with a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) that was in the process of starting up in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. Our goal was to help finish the research of a doctoral student working with the FQHC which would be used to decide what services would be offered at the clinic. The research included breaking the area up into census tracts, surveying the residents in the area, and then analyzing the data to come up with suggestions. This experience taught me the importance of community input in health interventions, as well as a variety of valuable research skills—and it ended up leading to a paid internship a summer later.

I’ve had dozens of great professors throughout my time in the School of Public Health and many courses worth mentioning. One of my favorites is taught by Dr. Joe Keating, who now serves as the Dean of the Undergraduate Public Health program. The title Issues and Strategies in Public Health left me unsure what to expect from the course, but starting from day one Dr. Keating made it clear that the class would focus on practical ways to battle infectious diseases in different parts of the world. His style of teaching was rather unconventional in a good way: the PowerPoints consisted almost entirely of photos that he or colleagues had taken in the regions we discussed in class. This meant that instead of studying the abstracts of public health policy, we got to see how the interventions changed within the target regions and what risks still remained. A good example is during his discussion of Guinea Worm, Dr. Keating showed photos of four different regions where it was transmitted and had groups pick out the best intervention for each one and explain why.

The Undergraduate Public Health building on the uptown campus provides a great space to meet with professors,
our advisors, and other students from the undergraduate and various graduate programs!

The service learning project that I mentioned before was correlated with a course taught by Dr. Local Solutions to Global Problems. Dr. Gleckler is one of the most involved public health professors due to her conveniently located office on the Uptown campus. Her involvement in shaping the undergraduate curriculum is reflected in her ability to get to know the students individually. Many students (myself included) end up asking Dr. Gleckler to write their recommendations for post-graduate jobs and graduate programs because she teaches them in two or more courses and has just as much of an interest in getting to know the students as she does in teaching them. Although this is a reflection on the greater trend of small, interactive classes at Tulane, it is especially true for her classes—even the larger-sized ones. Thanks to Dr. Gleckler’s service learning class, I got the aforementioned internship with the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ) where I organized and conducted direct research in the southeastern Louisiana region on immigrant worker health disparities. Since then I’ve presented the findings at conferences and to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Louisiana to further NOWCRJ’s advocacy.
Elisabeth Gleckler called

One last public health experience I’ll share that was made possible by Tulane was my role as a translator in Nicaragua. The trip, which I have actually gone on three times now, was with Dr. Brumfield, a cardiologist from my hometown of Lexington. I met Dr. Brumfield through a family friend when he asked me to help him with an upcoming medical mission run through Project Health for Leon since he knew I was bilingual. The brigade, which lasted for nine days during the school year, included clinic visits with dozens of patients and double digit cardiac device implantations—all of which I interpreted conversations for Dr. Brumfield with patients, nurses and other doctors.

Newcomb Tulane College is an entity that encompasses all five undergraduate schools and offers grants to students for research, travel and other independent or group projects. Applying for the grants includes writing a proposal and creating a budget, all of which I did for my trip, and they paid for the travel and housing expenses. Many students apply for these grants for a wide variety of projects, but they are especially useful for public health students who find international opportunities that may not otherwise be funded.

For all the freshmen out there undecided on what your major will be, don’t worry! There’s no way of knowing if something’s right for you until you try it. That’s why I always recommend that students who might be the slightest bit interested in the health sector take the introductory public health class to see if they like it. Most public health majors, like me, end up knowing right away.

Adam Kline is a Senior graduating in May 2016 with a Bachelors of Science in Public Health.