My Path to Public Health

My interest in public health stems from my interest in healthcare. While growing up, I have seen family members suffer from maladies and were later able to, through the attentive care of the skilled physicians, enjoy life more freely. As a high school student, I enjoyed different science courses from Advanced Topic Biology, Health, and Human Diseases to Medical Diagnosis, Genetics, and AP Psychology. I was in awe at the way our body worked, how our body is so strong, and yet so vulnerable. During the beginning of my undergraduate study, I majored in Biology and took Pre-Professional Medicine courses in order to study more about our body and the mechanisms that occur inside of us. When I transferred to NYU, I changed my major to economics because I was also interested in the ways that humans are more than just biological entities--they experience desire and express that desire on a daily basis when they purchase commodities.

My undergraduate volunteer experience cemented my interest in clinical medicine, while making me realize that a public health education is an important complementary component to medicine. My first experience was as a general hospital volunteer where my responsibilities were to interact with the patients and to provide service to them. Later on, I volunteered at two different clinical settings at Mount Sinai Medical Center: the Psychiatry Department for the Parental Resilience Program study led by Dr. Claude Chemtob, and the Emergency Department for the Sinai Associates Program led by Dr. David Newman. I helped screen and recruited potential patients for several ongoing studies which aim to answer specific questions related to identifying factors that contribute to the risk of health problems for individuals ...

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... and nurses, have greatly improved in their efforts to provide quality care to patients, there are still important clinical components that need further improvement on. By being more efficient in resource utilizations and in the documentations of patient information, hospitals can be greatly benefited in terms of reduced costs, time, and errors, while increasing patient satisfactions. Furthermore, by incorporating indicators in assessing performance and taking steps to find opportunities in improvements, hospitals can decrease certain types of undesirable conditions and events that occur while further increasing the quality of care and delivering safer performance. Resolving the current gaps in care would lay the ways to excellence in clinical quality of care which leads to better patient outcomes, ultimately leading to better health of the community as a whole.