I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about the class of 2021, especially students who have chosen to pursue a career in the public health field.
These are the students who maybe didn’t get a chance to complete their community-based internships, or their shadowing hours or their volunteer experiences. The students who, like so many of us, spent a tremendous amount of time this past year looking intently at a computer screen instead of looking directly into the eyes of their mentors, their teachers, their classmates, their communities, their clients, their patients.
The experience may affect not only their career plans but how they see themselves as rising health professionals. How will social workers in training incorporate their lived experiences of isolation into their future work? What kinds of strategies will emerging public health professionals put into practice, having seen the chaos we’ve lived through? How will the medical providers of the future be different from those that didn’t live through a global pandemic?
In my job as director of health professions advising at Northwestern University, I’ve seen the burnout, fear and depression in the faces of the students we work with. This is especially true for the students who have been directly affected by the pandemic, such as those who have lost relatives or whose parents have lost jobs. Students who have unstable internet connections or who share a single computer with their siblings or parents have also suffered.
But I have also seen in my students the determination and commitment to pursue their professional goals, perhaps with a better understanding of what their chosen careers will require of them, and with a deeper sense of how much they will bring to the health workforce.
My small sample comes from one of the better-funded universities in the country, but I worked for many years at San Francisco State University and I know that my col-leagues in California have seen what I have seen multiplied by a thousand.
I am calling on my counterparts across the health professions to take at least one newcomer under their professional wings this year. I know that many of us already do, but we need to make an extra effort with the class of 2021. Our students need to see us in the fields they want to enter, we need to be there making sure the door is open for them.
I am always in awe of the work that APHA’s Student Assembly does building a mentoring community. I urge you to engage with them in their programming throughout the year and during the Association’s Annual Meeting.
Here’s to the class of 2021! We see you. We love you, and we’re here for you.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about what you learned about yourselves this past year and how you think you will apply these experiences in your future career. Drop me a line at the email address below.
José Ramón Fernández-Peña, MD, MPA president{at}apha.org
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
