Public Health Personal Statement

1063 Words3 Pages

I firmly believe that through earning the credential of registered dietitian nutritionist and contributing to the body of scientific literature, I have a chance to impact the health outcomes of my family, friends, neighbors and future patients, as well as our future generations. I am confident that the Dietetic Internship and Masters of Public Health (DI/MPH) program at University of Texas School of Public Health (UTSPH) is the ideal environment to prepare me in the pursuit of my primary long-term goal of developing a career as a research dietitian. In addition to the program’s alignment with my professional interests, I am a candidate that will bring grit, curiosity, maturity and academic excellence to the 2017 cohort. Five years ago, …show more content…

The prospect of studying public health is very appealing, as it would include topics I have not yet been exposed to, such as biostatistics and epidemiology. I am particularly interested in less traditional public health interventions such as choice architecture as a supplement to nutrition education. The diverse research interests of UTSPH faculty and numerous program partnerships would allow for a broad range of exposure to intervention design, research and nutrition education programs. I could easily imagine myself working with Dr. Sharma in her efforts with Brighter Bites due to my interest in children’s eating patterns and desire to improve community-level health outcomes. I recently started volunteering with the Brighter Bites bag assembly team at Hines-Caldwell Elementary and have enjoyed seeing the intervention in action after reading about the statistically significant improvements to the home food environment among participants in Dr. Scharma’s 2016 paper in Preventative Medicine. The opportunity to complete a written culminating experience will support my short-term goal of strengthening my scientific writing skills and also my secondary long-term goal of achieving publication within the next three years. I have previously enjoyed my experience volunteering with Recipe for Success in their HISD school Seed-to-Plate classes, which included gardening …show more content…

Most notably, my 2016 internship with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center cemented my interest in research. Witnessing the transformative research that is occurring in our local institutions was thrilling. I enjoyed the minutiae of protocols, deep dives into the nuance of dietary recall methods, and researching emerging technology to support data collection. Shadowing the research dietitian and manager of the Bionutrition Research Core brought new excitement each day, which included attending a research seminar at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine, sitting in on interdisciplinary research study meetings, and learning to record dietary data in Nutrition Data Systems for Research. Processing participant dietary records, which were doubly recorded as photographic records and within a mobile food diary, was enlightening and will aid me in the future when I begin conducting 24-hour dietary recalls of my own. I was able to serve as a study participant as well, where I wore a continuous glucose monitor and kept a meticulous food diary for one week. Wearing the glucose sensor, calibrating the receiver with finger pricks multiple times per day, and watching my glucose levels gave me a bite-sized perspective for the daily tasks of diabetes patients I will encounter as a dietetic intern. From the viewpoint of a

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