About the Degree
Accepting my position at St. Olaf, I never thought about creating an individual major. In fact, even by the time I started my junior year, I had not thought seriously about creating my own major. I did not have a pin-point topic that I knew I was passionate about, instead I thought I would fit into a pre-existing major and after college I would specify my studies at graduate school. Throughout my first two years I changed my major twice. I came into St. Olaf thinking seriously about Music Therapy, and then after shadowing a music therapist, I realized I yearned for more patient interaction. Nursing appealed to me specifically because of the relationship with the patients. A nurse not only acts as an advocate and support for the patient, but also as a liaison between a wide array of healthcare professionals. Thus, I declared a nursing major. I spent 2 years in the nursing degree, and thought I would graduate with a nursing degree and later go into nursing administration. However, throughout the progression of my studies, as clinicals started getting more serious and we created patient care plans, etc, I realized nursing is not where I want to be. I learned a lot about systemic healthcare and about the hierarchy of professionals, but I ached to study the theories behind healthcare practices, rather than the practices themselves.
I was intrigued by the practice of slow medicine, and so I took that idea and ran with it. I read a lot about holistic therapies, old European and Chinese medicine practices, almshouses, and about the introduction, and takeover, of acute care medicine. I was much more interested and passionate about my outside readings and studies than the skills I was learning in class. Eventually, I realized I wanted to make my career in continuing those studies of slow and holistic medicines, I just needed to figure out how to make that a reality. After speaking with professors about potentially going into healthcare policy and administration after college, or going into public health, I decided I wanted to use my time at St. Olaf, and all the opportunities St. Olaf presents, to kickstart my career in public health policy and administration. Bizarrely, there is a gap within the preparation into healthcare at St. Olaf and there are no classes or majors for healthcare administration, specifically. Therefore, I am using the great classes St. Olaf does have to offer, as well as external opportunities such as internships, to best prepare myself for public health policy administration. Because of the large amount of independent study I have done in the last few years on the topic, I believe I am very capable of pursuing a more structured study of the topic with the help of professors and mentors.
About the Background
After having started this process, I have had ample time to think about how I got here, and I realize there was no exact moment in time or event that happened, it was an accumulation of experiences. I lived in England until I was 10, where there is national health insurance (National Health Service), and after moving to America I was able to easily identify the differences in the systems – time allocation, resources and services offered, priority patients, etc. Additionally, my father quit his job during our time in America and my family was left without health insurance for 2 years. Eventually, after months of paperwork and waiting, my brothers and I got Medicaid Insurance, but my father was not granted help from the Government because he was not a US citizen. Through that process I caught a glimpse of how difficult it is to get government healthcare for citizens, and how inaccessible it is for non-citizens. Finally, my family is very internationally spread, we have aunts/uncles/cousins on 6 of the 7 continents. Through conversations with those family members, I have gained a small insight to some of the universal issues around the world, one of the most prominent being healthcare. There is a huge gap in healthcare services across nations, partly dependent on practices and customs, but largely due to resources – finances, equipment, professionals, etc. That gap is an issue most people are aware of, but not enough people are doing anything about. I hope to try to understand that gap and make decisions/programs to create some sort of change in the right direction.