Grad's guide to graduate admissions essays - Colleen Reding 2015
Yale school of public health
Medicine/nursing/health
When I began teaching English in a rural Panamanian village after my first year of college, I expected to learn about teaching methods and educational disparities. Instead, I learned that education can be a luxury for so many people in light of daily struggles with illness, malnutrition, and lack of access to health care. Most of the town, including my host family, did not have running water or reliable electricity. Its health clinic, desperately short-staffed and difficult to reach by road, had all but shut its doors. Malnourishment kept many of my students from staying alert in class. This experience profoundly impacted my evolving interests and ambitions and opened my eyes to the potential to have a positive impact on the lives of others through public health.
I have always been fascinated by cultural difference, and as I started college I was immediately drawn to anthropology. My experiences in Panama added a new dimension to my interests, teaching me that health and culture are inextricably bound. Combating disease effectively requires more than medical science; the key to successful health interventions resides at the intersection of the social, cultural, biological, economic, political, and environmental forces that shape populations.
Throughout college, I actively explored the interests sparked by my summer in Panama. Beyond coursework in anthropology, sociology, international health, human rights, and women’s studies, I worked in a diverse array of settings throughout Washington, DC, and Brazil. As I learned about the health issues confronting sex workers, injection drug users, and HIV patients without access to care, I developed a strong interest in sexual and reproductive health issues that impact vulnerable populations in the United States and globally. I am committed to increasing access to services for these populations and to reducing the stigma around many of the issues they face. My undergraduate academic experience culminated in two senior theses: one exploring political activism among HIV-positive women in the United States and the other assessing the role of civil society in the development of Brazilian HIV treatment policies.
Over the past 6 years, I have worked with Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a nonprofit organization that provides harm reduction services to sex workers and injection drug users in Washington, DC. When I started at HIPS during my first year of college, I was trained as an outreach volunteer, spending two nights each month driving throughout the city distributing condoms, providing safer-sex counseling, and helping to administer a needle-exchange program. Through my 6 years there, I have gained valuable experience discussing health issues with a diverse array of people and become a team leader for groups of outreach volunteers and an HIV counselor and tester.
Instead of studying abroad during my third year, I took a one-semester leave of absence to volunteer full-time with CAMTRA, a community-based organization in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. During my time at CAMTRA, I supported CAMTRA’s outreach programs that worked to increase access to information about sexual health and domestic violence, and I helped to facilitate discussion forums for girls in secondary schools about women’s health and rights issues. As the only foreigner working with this organization, my volunteer work at CAMTRA provided me with a valuable cultural immersion experience. Over my final year at Georgetown, I also completed an internship at the Women’s Collective, which advocates and provides services for HIV-positive women. I spent the year working with a group of HIV-positive women on efforts to increase the voice of their community in influencing national HIV policies.
My current position at the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator has enabled me to contribute to the development of international health policy. Through my work, I have seen the vital role that public health analysis and research play in the well-being of people and communities throughout the world.
From the interpersonal to the international, my volunteer, academic, and professional experiences have given me several perspectives into the interactions between health and society, and have affirmed my desire to pursue a career in public health. Yale University’s Masters of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Sciences would be an ideal setting to explore my passion for public health and transform it into work that meaningfully touches the lives of other people. Yale’s commitment to practical applications of public health principles and research will give me the skills I need to follow this career path. I am particularly drawn to Yale because of its small program, where I will have the opportunity to work closely with outstanding faculty members, and because of the opportunity to conduct community-based public health research and practice in collaboration organizations like the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and the Connecticut Women’s Health Project.
I am especially drawn to the concentration in Global Health. This program’s interdisciplinary approach to health resonates deeply with my academic and practical experiences, drawing together economic, political, cultural, historical, and social issues related to risk for disease, violence, and access to healthcare services. Following graduation, I plan to work with marginalized populations to develop rights-based programs and conduct operational research with the goal of helping these communities improve their health status through creative and evidence-based problem-solving. The values of the Yale School of Public Health mirror my desires to address health disparities in vulnerable populations, promote a human rights-based approach to health, and learn from the populations that I work to serve.