Hello again, fellow knowledge-seekers! It’s been approximately two weeks since I left Senegal and stepped foot on American soil. After the culture shock—and digestive shock—of being back home, I’ve been able to assess and analyze my observations from Senegal.

About half of my time in Senegal was spent in the hospital observing the consultations of the diabetes doctor. Thankfully, she spoke English and could explain everything to me, and as someone interested in public health, I enjoyed being able to see how patients interacted with the hospital.

The biggest thing I discovered was how intricately economics are woven with health. Unfortunately, there were many patients who couldn’t control their diabetes. Some patients complained, with sad or cynical smiles, that diabetes was the disease of the wealthy. When you break down what is needed to manage diabetes, it certainly seems like it. If a household had a diabetic patient, the family needs to be able to pay for extra food, since the diabetic patient can’t eat the same meals as the rest of the family. In addition, the patient needs to pay for their medication; a glucometer, and the lancets and test strips needed to maintain consistent use of it; regular blood tests as recommended by their doctor; the hospital consultation bills; and any other costs that arise from not being able to manage the disease properly—including surgery and prosthetics for amputations.

This is the same case for diabetics here in the U.S. I’ve long known and been taught at Penn State that health is largely impacted by wealth, and even something as minimal as housing can have a dramatic impact on well-being. Surprisingly, however, witnessing it firsthand in Senegal and seeing the human faces behind this problem has really put this problem in perspective for me.

The question that follows from knowing this is, “Where do we go from here?” And that’s complicated. I’ve been studying the way culture impacts health; incorporating this economic components further puts public health issues in perspective, but also makes solving them more difficult by having to consider more factors. So, I don’t have a clear answer right now.

However, it is good that I’m considering these factors now, because that means I’ll have a greater impact on public health in the future. And that increased potential for impact is all the proof needed to confirm that this experience was worthwhile.

Major – Biobehavioral Health
Minor – Global Health, Microbiology

Hometown – Bronx, New York

Hello everyone! My name is Moses Akintunde, a rising senior this fall studying Biobehavioral Health. I am a New York native, and I currently reside in the Bronx.

This summer I was awarded the prestigious honor to intern at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The internship is part of Project IMHOTEP; a summer program designed to train underrepresented minorities for careers in public health, and is one of six programs under the CDC Undergraduate Public Health Scholars (CUPS) program. My particular internship is open to rising juniors, seniors, and recent graduates, and it had presented itself to me at the most opportune time. Here, I work with the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria (DPDM) in the Center for Global Health. My responsibilities are to conduct, analyze, assess, and present the findings of a national survey of U.S. laboratories for a parasite that causes Cyclosporiasis, a gastrointestinal illness. In English, I’m conducting a survey and reporting my findings.

Speaking for my fellow undergrads, it can easily be agreed that finding the right career path is harder than finding an open computer during finals week. Now of course the exception exists of those that have known exactly what they’ve wanted to do in life since we were all still playing with Barbie’s and Hot Wheels. But honestly, who really knows if their intended career path is indeed the right fit. Speaking for myself, I’ve bounced back and forth between pre-med and public health degree options. Why? Well personally, I just wasn’t sold that med school was actually for me. At one point I had listed more reasons ‘against’ than ‘for’ attending med school. And on that list against you would’ve found the years, debt, O-Chem (shivers*), and most importantly, my lack of passion. I admire nothing more in people my age than those who are passionate about their intended careers; and before this internship, I wasn’t passionate at all. This summer, however, I learned that public health is what I intend to do, and what’s most comforting is that I have absolutely no idea where the field will take me. But that’s okay. From all of the people I’ve met this summer not one person actually had life figured it out. I’ve heard countless stories, and they’re all dedicated to this same field.

Danielle Connor updates us on her work with kids at Easter Seals.  Read her first blog post.

I had previous notions about special needs and what it takes to communicate with people who are different than me. I think it’s safe to say that I was sheltered in a world of average people knowledge. What I know is pretty standard, but incorporating what you know into what you do and think comes with going out into the world where people are. You acquire resourceful knowledge that helps create your development as a person more so than the exercise the ability to memorize facts.

Special needs children know more than most think they do, and I used to be one of those people. It seemed as if we were all just guiding them through activities that they did modified versions of – crafts, eating, book reading, etc. We’d read a book, and a child with multiple developmental delays might look like they’re staring off into space, having every page come and go with no effect. Correctly asking questions to them afterwards, however, gives them a chance to answer in a way that they can tell you what they’re thinking. For example, give them two responses that they can choose from, and while saying each one, stroke a different side of their face. “Does he have a red (left cheek) or blue (right cheek) ball?” When they lean their head to the correct side and look at you, you begin to realize that all of this isn’t for nothing. I taught a boy how to tell me how he wanted to be pushed on the swing – from the f-f-front or the b-b-back? His absence of language outside of three words makes it difficult to communicate with anyone, but just hopping onto the swing and instantly giving me his “bb-“ sound showed me that he remembered what I taught him. He remembered! And it’s something I taught him by myself!

These subtle signs of improvement touch you in a way that makes you feel like it’s all coming together, but it also makes you think even more about your passion. Are the smallest improvements in one child worth an entire lifetime devoted to this profession? That’s where the difference between passion and profession comes in – one can sustain you and the other can fund you. I decided that even if my clients can only call me D-d-d- because of my hard work, then that’d be the fortune of a passion.

My name is Ali Greenberg and I will be beginning my Senior Year this fall. I am studying Hospitality Management with a minor in Labor and Employment Relations. I spent the past Spring semester studying in Florence, Italy through a new Hospitality Management Global Program at Florence University of the Arts. It was truly an amazing experience immersing myself in the Italian culture inside and outside of the classroom. After graduation I hope to pursue a career in the Hospitality Industry that allows me to combine my passion for the growing hospitality field and love of traveling.

The hospitality industry is ever evolving and growing, ensuring that no day is dull or ever the same. Currently working as a rotational intern at the Hyatt House in King of Prussia, PA, my summer internship solidifies this notion. This unique property is owned and managed by Lodgeworks, a dynamic hotel development and management company based in Wichita, KN. The Hyatt House is classified as an extended stay property. This exclusive concept attracts guests who are primarily staying more than five days and provides them with residentially inspired suites. Often these are business travelers who return frequently, thus allowing the hotel employees a chance to build a strong relationship with these guests. Every few weeks I am cycled into a different department, exposing me to the many aspects of a hotel property. So far I have worked in multiple departments including engineering, sales, food and beverage, and just about everything in-between. It is great to see all of the various responsibilities and procedures that each department follows on a day-to-day basis and further observing how each division interacts with one another. Jeff Heim and Rosemarie Hibler, two faculty members of the Hospitality Management program, made a visit to the hotel this past week. It was great to show them the property as well as see the other Penn State alumni that work at the Hyatt House!

Hi! My name is Jamie Altman and I just finished my senior year at Penn State. I am a Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management major in the Commercial Recreation option. I’m originally from Laurel, Maryland and you’ll most likely find me outside enjoying the sunshine! At Penn State, I was involved in Sigma Sigma Sigma Sorority and working at the Penn State Bookstore.

This summer, I’m completing my RPTM 495A internship requirement as an Activities Coordinator/Recreation Intern at Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. Ocean Reef Club is an exclusive club that offers a wide variety of recreation pastimes to its members and guests.

As an intern, I move around from beach operations on Buccaneer Island, planning and leading summer camps with Reef Club Kids, helping out with various corporate group events, and working with the Member Events department in planning an Ultimate Summer Weekend event held in August. While it looks like paradise, it is actually a lot of work! The best part is that I get to interact with people from all around the world every day and each day is never the same as the one before.

Here I am with the rest of the recreation team during our activities forum from June 4^th (I’m in the blue shirt toward the right side!) As part of a team bonding experience, we later ended up covered in whipped cream, chocolate syrup, graham crackers, ketchup, mustard, and spaghetti! We even had a lip-sync battle with the Director of Recreation!

I’ll be heading back to Happy Valley to walk across the stage in August. While I’m still not sure what I want to do after this internship, I do know that I really like the club culture. I like that there are many different departments that work together and that there is a relationship between the associates and members and guests of the club. The recreation industry is definitely for me!

Hello, I’m Kaylee Bangs, a rising sophomore and Biobehavioral Health Major. Along with taking a
few classes and having the awesome job as a LEAP mentor, this summer has been filled with research here at University Park. I am from the small town of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania and, apart from my love of learning; I enjoy being outside as much as possible! After graduation, I really hope to join the Peace Corps before ending up in medical school. On the side of my other passions, I love to study early childhood development under the direction of Dr. Douglas Teti. I am very fortunate to have received a summer research grant proved by the John T. and Paige S. Smith Endowment for Undergraduate research that has enabled me to continue my work on infant sleep.

As a freshman, I was fulfilling my simple freshman duties of searching for possible research labs to work in. When I read the short blurb about project S.I.E.S.T.A. II, I knew I wanted to get involved right away. I was soon trained in watching videos of infant bedtime routines and learned to code certain infant behaviors along with parent-child interactions. However, coding wasn’t enough. I wanted to learn more. So, this summer I’ve gotten to start my own project. I am exploring the question “How does parental presence affect the quality of infant sleep”.

I think that parenting behaviors (and really all human behaviors) are very interesting to study because I feel that the impacts of simple behaviors are often overlooked. For example:  visiting your baby’s room throughout the night. Past research has demonstrated that greater parent presence and contact with the infant during the night is associated with poorer quality sleep in infants (Mindell et al., 2009, Sadeh et al., 2010). Dr. Teti’s Project SIESTA II has acquired approximately 100 videos of infant sleep across multiple ages as well as sleep data measured through actigraphs and nighttime video. Using these methods, the effect of parent presence and contact during the night on infant sleep quality can be studied in much greater depth and accuracy. This project could help determine what types of parental activities at night time best promote quality sleep for infants.

This seemed to be an overwhelming question at first as I had only previously been qualified to observe and quantify bedtime behaviors; however, I soon was taught how to run simple statistical tests in order to find correlations within our data. I am currently in the process of running data and testing different variables such as wake frequency, duration, and fragmentation in relation with parental presence at nighttime. I am so excited to continue my research throughout the summer and report back on what I have discovered.

Until then, back to watching infants sleep! Thanks for reading!

Hello blogosphere! I’m a rising senior, double majoring in Anthropology and Biobehavioral Health and minoring in Global Health. With my belief that health is a universal human right, I’m pursuing a career in public health. I aspire to work in under-resourced areas, both domestically and internationally, using my research and advocacy skills to help people lead healthier lives. I’m also a local, from the State College area, but this summer I have the opportunity to travel out of the continent—and my comfort zone. Welcome to Senegal!

(This is a picture of the beach, so close to my apartment, it’s practically my backyard. Jealous yet?)

I have the pleasure of spending six weeks of my summer (almost five weeks down, a week and a half left!) in the beachside town of M’Bour, Senegal, as part of a fieldwork component for the Global Health minor. While there, I have been shadowing doctors at the local hospital, assisting in research about traditional healers, and conducting my own research on caregivers of diabetic patients. Along the way, I have been learning Senegalese culture, acquiring some Wolof, strengthening my French, and making new friends.

The biggest thing that I am doing here, thanks to funding from the College of HHD, is research for my thesis. Working with Dr. Rhonda BeLue, I’m studying whether caregivers, through their role in helping diabetic patients, are more motivated to prevent diabetes by changing their own health behaviors. This is one of the first times I’ve conducted research interviews, and they aren’t as simple or easy as they may seem on paper. So far, I’ve been learning more about the research process than about caregivers!

Firstly, interviews are long and exhausting. We ask people open-ended questions because we’re conducting qualitative research and because we want participants to tell us their own stories. However, this means every participant’s interview takes between thirty to forty minutes. Some days, I interview eight consecutive participants, totaling about four continuous hours, asking each the same questions, end on end.

Secondly, it is not only the relationship between the participant and I that matters during the interview, but also the relationship between me and my translator. This relationship is not something I have considered before, because it is rarely mentioned in academic articles. In order to have the best working relationship, we both have to respect and be patient with one another. Thankfully, I have been given a good-natured translator who has been working with his tedious and detail-oriented student patiently and tirelessly.

Finally, over the course of collecting data, my conclusions sometimes become unclear. I’m getting some of the answers I have expected to get, but I’ve also gotten some surprising ones I didn’t.

The shocking thing is that these interviews aren’t even the bulk of my work. Upon returning home, I have to compile and analyze my data, a task that is at once daunting and exciting. It’s a good thing I like the work I’m doing, and I look forward to discovering my conclusions!

Major: Nutritional Sciences, emphasis in Community Nutrition and Food Security

Minor: Environmental Inquiry
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA

Extracurricular Activities: Teaching Assistant, UNICEF, Student Nutrition Association, Student Sustainability Advisory Council, FastStart Leadership Board, AASIA Coordinator

Hi there! My name is Jenny Dang and I am a rising Senior studying Nutrition in hopes of becoming a Registered Dietitian. This summer I will be interning at the Children’s Institute of Pittsburgh and Farm Truck Foods to fulfill a course in the Dietetics Program that requires students to complete a 300 hour field experience with a professional in a nutrition-related field. Students are expected to find a preceptor and I was lucky enough to find 2 RDs to take me on!

The Children’s Institute is the only free-standing pediatric rehabilitation specialty hospital in Pennsylvania and one of only twenty in the country. The organization is dedicated to children with special needs and offers programs for autism therapies, spinal cord injury, brain injury, functional feeding, reflex neurovascular dystrophy, and Prader-Willi Syndrome. While interning with the Nutrition & Food Service Department, I was exposed to different diets like gluten-free casein-free, ground, pureed, fat restricted, and calorie restricted. I consulted with patients for the diet orders, developed a Prader-Willi meal policy to improve patient satisfaction, and met with vendors and learned about current food trends at a US Food Fanatics Show.

The most exciting area I observed was the Center for Prader-Willi Syndrome, the world’s only hospital-based inpatient program. I noticed that an overall theme in Patient Services and The Day School is portion control, but it is especially important for Prader-Willi. Those with PW think about food constantly so if the smallest thing about their meal looks different, this can result in a behavioral problem. I learned how crucial it is to measure everything for correct portion sizes and to make sure everyone’s tray looks the same, not to just minimize any problems, but because they are on restricted diets of 600, 800, or 1000 calories for the whole day.

This past week, I was a counselor for Cook Like A Chef, a camp that promotes good cooking and healthy lifestyles for 10-13 year olds. Each day consisted of a lesson on MyPlate, food demonstration and tasting, and cooking solely done by the kids. Each unit of 3 kids prepared a recipe together and then shared what they made for a family style lunch. It was a fun week and I was impressed by their cooking skills (and love of kale chips)!

For the rest of the summer, I will be interning at Farm Truck Foods, Pittsburgh’s first mobile farmers market! It is essentially a grocery store on a truck that will improve food security for children, families, and the elderly residing in food deserts. Their mission is to bridge the gap between farmers and community members by providing access to nutritious, affordable, and local foods. Some of my projects include presenting nutrition lessons, creating recipe cards, and doing cooking demonstrations.

I am learning so much and cannot believe how fast this summer is flying by – stay tuned to see what’s in store for me at FTF!

My name is Danielle Connor, and I like to move. Whether it’s going for a run at dawn, swimming in the lake, or slowly, but surely, increasing my number of pushups, I love the feeling that exercise and movement give me. This led to my decision to study Kinesiology at Penn State, going from suburban Philadelphia to one of the most well-known towns on the east coast. After receiving outstanding textbook and social knowledge from my professors in KINES, I combined my love for kids and movement and put myself on the path to graduate school in occupational therapy. This summer I’m interning at Easter Seals, a non-profit, nationwide health agency that helps children and adults alike attain greater independence. The State College facility I’m with for the summer is a pre-school that integrates kids with disabilities (motor, speech, behavioral) with what’s called “typical” children – those who are normally developing. I’m working in a room with 3 & 4 year olds, so there’s learning every day both for me and the kids.

Day 1: “I have a gun.” Not two minutes into playing with my first group of kids comes this statement from a little boy, to which I respond by looking at the classroom’s lead teacher for some help. “No thank you. We don’t talk about that at school,” she replies. Interacting with the kids was my number one priority when I began, so I’ve been listening to better learn the way the teachers talk to them. It’s easy to accomplish with the more typically developing children, but it sometimes takes a little more thought for those with special needs.

Half of the kids in the classroom I work in have special needs or behavioral disorders, or they’ve received the overarching term “developmental delay,” something given to a child who is socially, physically or cognitively behind, but has not yet received a diagnosis. The other half of the kids are typically developing, and they set a great example of peer interaction for those that have difficulty with it. A child with Down’s Syndrome, for example, might not know how to play a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, so by watching what others his age do, how they cheer and react during “the chase” is important. They’re surrounded by one on one contact with parents, therapists and adults, but they don’t often click with others their age.

Easter Seals has an individualized education plan (IEP) for each child, and often letting them go test their social skills on the playground or at lunch is important – they don’t have that safe adult that understands their disorder and gives them special attention. It seemed sad to me sometimes when they ended up playing alone, but they’re trying every day to work on these skills that they’ll use for the rest of their lives.