
Geoffrey See's creation of the EduHealth program opened two doors.
One was for himself, and the other is for hundreds of West Philadelphia students both now and in the future.
After arriving on campus this fall, the Wharton and College freshman has engaged in research relating to urban health education, ultimately developing a project known as EduHealth.
A health center at Sayre High School at 58th and Walnut streets, EduHealth is designed to serve as both a care provider for students and the entire community, as well as a career pipeline for students interested in the health care industry.
The program, which serves as a place for both basic medical care and health education, originally sprang from See, who was enrolled last fall in both Management 100 and professors Lee Benson and Ira Harkavy's "Urban University-Community Relationships" seminar.
See "became very focused on the education and health idea and how to integrate the two concepts," Harkavy said. "He became focused on this as something he could do as part of his whole undergraduate career."
See's vision, to develop a health center at Sayre as a source of care for students and as a hub for the community, quickly moved from class project to intensive research as See and other interested students recognized its potential upside.
"We created this model called the school-based community health center, and we looked at the benefits of using this model," See said. "By the end of the semester, I came together with a group of 26 other students, and we decided to put our ideas into action."
According to Wharton freshman Jeremy Lui, another student involved with EduHealth, the research is growing extremely fast.
"We got so involved in this project that we decided to make this into not just an extracurricular activity but a project for anyone from Penn and the surrounding community to get involved in," Lui said. "We're almost implementing what we're researching at the same time."
This semester, See, Lui and six other students have been working together with Harkavy on independent studies related to this topic.
The health center is expected to be completed this summer, but for See, this is only the beginning of a process that will take years.
"Once the health center gets started, we need to look at how all these programs tie into the work of the health center and how [they] will come together at the health center," he said. "We're just in the initial stages - there's so much more to be done."
Although the building itself is not quite complete, EduHealth has already begun its internship program.
The program will sponsor five students at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
And what could be a boon for West Philadelphia students has given See his share of accolades as well.
See will be one of 300 students worldwide to present at the 11th World Business Dialogue in Cologne, Germany, this weekend. He has also been selected to appear in the German magazine Harvard Businessmanager and has been invited to work with the World Economic Forum in China this summer.
But Harkavy and Benson both see See's work as something more - an indication that undergraduates are quite capable of doing research.
"What Geoffrey exemplifies is the idea of taking a real world problem and having it be the organizing principal of an entire undergraduate experience," Harkavy said. "It points to what Penn undergrads could do, and points to what the curriculum could be and how it's possible to get this done."
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