In the body of Penn’s public health community, the right hand does not know what the left hand does, or sometimes even that the left hand exists at all.
With over a dozen public health and global health student organizations on campus, plus speakers and programs coordinated by different departments and schools, students who want to get involved with public health have an enormous number of options.
Students Taking Action on Public Health, a new student public health group on campus, seeks to act as a clearinghouse for public health information and a liaison between interested students and University departments.
The group’s founders and College seniors Mariana Gonzalez and Hauchie Pang came up with the idea for STAPH last semester after working together on a project about Penn’s 2009 meningitis outbreak.
While discussing public health at Penn, they realized that no single organization on campus dealt with all aspects of public health.
STAPH hopes to liaise with many groups on campus, including the Office of Health Education, the Student Health Service and the Health and Societies Board, to coordinate events and campaigns and publicize many events on- and off-campus that may not be well known.
“We sort of see ourselves as trying to rope all these different health-related groups together and sort of concentrating our efforts,” Gonzalez said. “Why not dream big?”
“Public health is a very broad field,” Pang added. “You can’t limit yourself to only one aspect because then you’re not really doing anything. I feel like if there’s anything Health and Societies teaches you, it’s that you need to be very interdisciplinary and very broad.”
Gonzalez and Pang said while they are still in the process of determining the club’s direction with input from members, STAPH will have three main branches: education, service and on-campus campaigns. STAPH’s first major action, a Locust Walk campaign to promote personal hand sanitation among Penn students, will run this week.
Nursing sophomore Molly Hampshire attended STAPH’s first meeting after hearing about the group from a friend. She said she was motivated to get more involved in public health after reading the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the life of noted public health expert Paul Farmer.
“Here in West Philadelphia, public health is really something that needs attention on this campus, especially because we can really do a lot to help,” Hampshire said. “I think we got some really good ideas and plans going and I hope that we can make them work.”
STAPH will have its next meeting tomorrow at 8 p.m. in Rodin M20.
