Week 3:
Presentations and New Projects

June 21, 2019

This week absolutely flew by! Monday, I spent most of the day turning spreadsheet boxes into graphs and presentation materials. The rough draft I had made on Friday helped, but in the end, I started mostly from scratch. This is because I needed to re-organize the data in order to make the charts needed for the presentations. Luckily, I put in a little more work over the weekend so I was good to go by Monday morning. I finished the presentation that afternoon and did a practice run-through with my supervisor. She gave me a couple pointers regarding how to approach the audience and frame the data I analyzed. After that and a few changes to the graphs, I was good to go!

The next day, I presented all that I had done to the Healthy Tri Town Coalition, a group of individuals representing all three of the towns that are a part of the school district: Mattapoisett, Rochester, and Marion. The group originally formed as a reaction to the same data that was presented in 2015 to limit the risky behaviors of youth in the future. The coalition is broken into three subgroups: community culture; safe, healthy and respectful relationships; and substance use and mental health. They are the first group to see these results as the data is not public yet.

My presentation followed the three subgroups as well, I covered topics such as drunk driving, wearing seatbelts, bullying in various forms, dating and sexual violence, questions about suicidality, use of various substances, and age of first use regarding substances. Those in the audience included school administrators, a few members of the police, public health officials, members of the community, and other interested stakeholders. The presentation lasted about an hour with a few questions at the end. As the coalition broke into their subgroups and talked through next steps, I spoke with the superintendent about what else he may need from the data. He mentioned that he would like a full report of all the responses, but it doesn’t need to get to him until later this summer.  My supervisor said my presentation was excellent but we were so focused that we forgot to take a picture. Below is the staged shot we took later.

Following the presentation, my supervisor and I debriefed the next steps regarding the YRBS data and talked through other potential projects. Although there are quite a few I have the possibility of accomplishing, many of them can be done simultaneously or be spaced out throughout the rest of the summer. Most of these projects include analyzing data or garnering new data. We have a few surveys in the community whose results I can analyze and questions about public health processes that I may need to create a database to answer.

The rest of the week we traveled to community meetings and got started on some of these projects. One of our weekly meetings that I look forward to is at the senior center in town. Every week the seniors have what is called “Memory Café.” In this program, those with dementia or memory problems and their caregivers are invited to come to the senior center for a meal, and to do an activity together. The activities change every week but they’re meant to get the seniors active and involved in their surroundings. It’s a chance for them to socialize, have fun, and form a new community. This week the activity was BINGO. Little did I know, I am really lucky when it comes to Bingo. I played a few games with them and won more than once. This may not seem like average public health work but this population is of vital importance to the community. Each week there’s different people there, and new issues are discussed between my supervisor, the senior center staff, and the seniors themselves. The program is only a few years old but it’s had great success with the community so far.

I’ll keep you posted on all the projects to come!