At its first meeting of the year, one Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) student from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health mused, “What will our WhatsApp group look like in 5 years?” Months later, at the end of the academic year, the DrPH Class of 2020 may very well have a glimmer of what this dynamic might look like. At their final meeting of the year at the Incubator, the DrPH students chose to share aspirational descriptions of their upcoming Summer Immersion projects, in a way that they hope to build on in the future.
As with every session of the year, they asked each other a challenging question and gave each member of the group an opportunity to present. The cohort graphically presented what they hope to convey through their immersion projects, in a way that prepares them well to address other audiences on matters of health, enhance the projects themselves, and make the best use of the Incubator’s creative space.
The final exercise allowed Hector Carrasco to envision the 10 weeks he will spend in Mexico City and Chihuahua. The rest of the cohort’s summer projects were equally inspiring: Renzo Guinto will focus on the “wicked problem” of climate change and health in the Philippines; Morissa Sobelson, on firearms and health in Utah; Dominique Rouleau, on children of asylum seekers in Sweden, France, and Germany; Stephanie Kang, on human rights barriers to addressing HIV and malaria; and Anuoluwa Ishola, on strengthening health systems in Tanzania.
The Incubator looks forward to welcoming back the DrPH cohort in the fall, when they return to discuss “what they learned,” or “something surprising” from their summer immersions.