Hats Off: A Successful Week in the Sun
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Cathy Nguyen
2nd Year, MS Biostatistics Candidate
I am still in disbelief that I landed back in Michigan this past weekend. Last blog post, I reflected on my fun and fieldwork in Grenada. So in this blog, I will show off more hats; and reflect on my overall experience and the lessons learned.
The week before leaving for Grenada, I lacked a lot of confidence in the work I was doing. As a biostatistics student, I had limited experience facilitating interviews and collecting and analyzing qualitative data. I craved the structure I had in my courses, which is rare for public health in practice. My group knew we needed to be flexible in our tact and delivery. Grenadians love to share their stories and ideas, so the work isn’t in the questions we ask but in how we include them in the conversation. We are outsiders, so establishing rapport was especially important. Even though our project had a specific focus, we had other discussions that gave us invaluable information about their community and the hats they wear within their community. Thus, when doing the analysis, I appreciated the humanity behind the data and not just the final findings.
While in Grenada, I grew genuinely fond of the island and the people here. It made the final presentation nerve-wracking in front of the Red Cross president and members for the first time. Luckily, they were receptive and impressed with our work, especially how we tied it to the previous projects. I hope future teams see how even though a week does not feel long enough, we will contribute to hopefully long-lasting partnerships with significant future implications. Work will always be there, but we will deepen the space for upcoming Michigan public health students to execute it with their unique thinking caps.
To wrap up this hat-theme blog post trilogy, I want to say that my time in Grenada was my most rewarding week as a Michigan graduate student. I got to learn from and be supported by the other eleven incredible students and our three phenomenal mentors. I feel honored to get to know them. I tip my hat to all they accomplished in our short week together. I cannot wait to see how they will grow as public health professionals after dawning our graduation caps and gowns. It will be a cool hat, but there will be more to find and wear.