My name is Aafia Syed and
I'm currently a Writing Seminars Major. However, I'm considering
double majoring in Sociology. As a freshman, I have a lot of time to
figure things out before I have to declare my major.
I decided to take this
course because I have an elder brother who is a Public Health Major.
He would always call home and tell me about the things he learned in
this class and I found it to be fascinating information. In addition
to this, although I am a humanities major, I heard around campus that
there is a social science track that one can take if they choose to
do something in the public health; this was appealing to me because
what initially drew me away from public health as a field was my
decision not to go into medicine.
Public Health, in my
mind, is the field dedicated to protecting and improving the health
of people and communities in general.
My interests in public
health are not too specific. I'm learning very quickly that public
health is not something exclusive, but rather related to all other
fields and ideas and a part of everything. I'm interested most, I
suppose, in issues involving poverty and race, just because these are
issues I have never known much about but always wanted to understand.
Growing up in a fairly wealthy and not very diversity community, I
don't have much experience with these issues and would like to
understand them at a deeper level; this kind of information is also
important to me because what I want to do career-wise involves
community projects and improving education and quality of life
through working with NGO's and such.
The first two classes of
Intro to Public Health were a surprise to me. Honestly, we covered so
many topics in such a short amount of time that I was overwhelmed,
but in a good way, in a way that intrigued me because it was not what
I had expected. Public health, I quickly learned, is a field
associated with almost everything that one experiences in life and
relevant to everyone in some way or another; it's not just a field
for doctors to be interested in and that was very refreshing to be
aware of.
