In Review
HEALTHY DISCUSSION: Emily Vreeland ’12 (left) and Daniel Cohn ’12 (right) talk with Edwin van Wijngaarden, the chair of the steering committee for academic programs in public health. (Photo: Brandon Vick)Daniel Cohn ’12 says a new perspective from the social sciences is helping to transform his view of medicine.
“Disparities in housing, access to health care—it’s so relevant to what I see everyday,” says Cohn, who comes from Northfield, Ohio, and plans one day to attend medical school.
Cohn is getting that new perspective from Introduction to Public Health, a broad survey of public health history, concepts, and contemporary issues. The course is part of a new network of public health–related programs that enrolled their first students this fall.
The programs offer four majors: social science–based majors in epidemiology; health policy; and health, behavior, and society; and a humanities–based major in bioethics. There are also five clusters associated with the programs.
“The new majors in areas related to public health build upon the foundation established by the health and society major,” says Dean of the College Richard Feldman, referring to the major, developed in 1986, that the freshly designed offerings replace. “The new majors will provide students with a more diverse set of course offerings and will enable them to study the various aspects of the field in greater depth. With added involvement of faculty from the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, students will have even more opportunities to study with leading experts in these areas.”
The product of collaboration between the College and the Medical Center, the programs provide an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and responding to global and regional public health challenges. They draw from educational programs in the Medical Center’s Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, a comprehensive set of course offerings from the College, and administrative and faculty support from both the College and the Medical Center.
There has been growing interest nationally in undergraduate education in public health—a discipline that concerns itself with the well-being of whole societies rather than of individuals—in recent years, says Edwin van Wijngaarden, an assistant professor and division chief of epidemiology in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine. He chairs the steering committee for the new programs.
In response to the rising interest, some schools have created courses; others, majors.
“Here, what we will have is more comprehensive: multiple majors,” he says.
“Before you could make connections with people at the Medical Center, but it’s easier now, and opens up new opportunities for research” by students, says Emily Vreeland ’12, a native of Medina, N.Y., who plans to declare her major in one of the new programs.
“The program is broader, and at the same time, more focused” than the original health and society major, van Wijngaarden says. “The four majors cover in depth the broad range of public health research and interest.”
There’s a common thread in all four majors, however, that’s expressed through the set of core-competencies courses. “You learn to think critically in an interdisciplinary fashion,” and to apply that thinking to complex issues with important implications for health, such as globalization and climate change, van Wijngaarden says.
The ties the programs now have with the Medical Center “expands the expertise,” he adds. “It combines what we do in community and preventive health with a liberal education.”
The courses Cohn is taking this fall—which also include van Wijngaarden’s Concepts of Epidemiology—have given him a “large scope-view of the health care system,” he says. He plans to declare a major in public health.
“One reason I chose Rochester is that I have so many interests academically, and here we have the freedom to choose. And I think with this major, we certainly have the opportunity to do that.”
