More on the Grassroots Initiatives for Global Health Conference at MIT

As you all already know Marisa, Meygan, and I attended MIT’s Grassroots Initiatives for Global Health conference some weeks back. Marisa wrote a blog post about the specifics of it.  I wanted to focus a bit more on the main lessons from the conference and about my personal experience.

To begin with, I would like to mention, again, that I love going to GlobeMed events hosted by other chapters and the national office! They are great for networking with public health professionals I look up to, learning about various issues, and meet great people our age with the same interests.  I have also found that talking to others involved with GlobeMed has increased my passion for our mission and I’ve received some great advice about how to improve our chapter from members of other chapters.  GlobeMed events/conferences are great for collaborative learning!  Moral of this post; attend these events!

One of the great, new opportunities I learned about is PIH Engage.  PIH Engage is a new project launched by Partners in Health that focuses on brining people together to discuss global health issues and to advocate for the social justice and health equity.  This program goes hand-in-hand with GlobeMed’s mission to give voice to the voice-less.  Check it out, here’s the link http://act.pih.org/page/content/community-organizing.

Another important point of the conference was to highlight the fact that we don’t have to dedicate our lives/careers to global health in order to make a difference, we just to contribute however we can.  There are so many different ways to contribute (if you have any questions about how your interests/major fit into the fight for global health equity and social justice in general, let me know and I’ll try to give some guidance).  However, if you guys are interested in devoting your lives to the fight for global health the speakers (global health practitioners) gave some great advice as to how to enter a career in global health.  I know this is a question I’ve asked many times, global health’s multi-faceted so it is hard to know a exact career path.  Most of us think medical school is necessary, but this is not the case! We need economists, politicians, scientists, humanitarians, public health practitioners, etc on our side! All of these fields are imperative for the fight for global health equity and global justice.

Here’s a link from Columbia that describes some career paths in global health:

http://new.sipa.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/Career%20Op%20Global%20Health.pdf

-Ilkania