My grandmothers are the reason I started caring about prevention. One of my grandmothers smoked, and she also lived with obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and she died from pancreatic cancer. My other grandmother is still alive but also battles obesity and high blood pressure. When I lined all of that up, it hit me that almost every single one of those is something public health works to prevent. That’s not a coincidence, and it stopped “prevention” from being a boring word for me. It made it personal.
I keep seeing the same lesson everywhere I go. Volunteering on a hospital floor at a local hospital, working on the public health internship in Nigeria, helping younger kids at the local community rec center, and learning at my research program at UCF this summer. Over and over, it’s clear that it’s better, cheaper, and honestly kinder to stop people from getting sick than to only treat them once they already are.
I’m a sports and music kid first. I’d rather be at the gym or making beats than doing almost anything. But I want to point that same energy at public health, because the questions I can’t stop thinking about are the big ones: why do some communities get sicker than others, and what can we change before anyone ends up in a hospital bed?
Bottom line: Stopping disease before it starts is the whole game, and that’s what I want to spend my life on.
The Global Pulse 