During my senior year at Macalester College, I had the opportunity to join the college’s Health Promotion team as a program assistant. Through my role, I worked with students and staff from the Health and Wellness Center, the Civic Engagement Center, and Disability Services to envision, research, and implement better health services for our diverse student body. I took on many roles throughout the year such as:

Towards the beginning of my experience doing this work, I was enrolled in PSYC 272 Health Psychology with the amazing Professor Jaine Strauss and became especially aware of the intricacies of promoting healthy behavior. The synthesis of my experiences led me to realize that there was a large problem area when it came to disseminating information to the student body, and that the root of the issue lay in the Hamre Center website.

Successfully sharing information in a way that is accessible and that resonates with the intended audience is arguably the most useful health tool there is. The impact of health services and resources on and off campus is severely limited by how well informed students are about them. It has become increasingly clear that investment in appropriate outreach is sometimes more important than providing new services. This is a problem that is particularly important in a post-pandemic world where individuals’ connection to institutions and places is rapidly changing and, in my opinion, significantly weakening. Building rapport turns people from statistics to fully fleshed out individuals who interact meaningfully with healthcare professionals.

Using my web development training from my COMP 446 Internet Computing computer science capstone—taught by Professor Joslenne Peña—I began a conversation with fellow health promotion assistants about web development principles. During the 2022 winter break, I then thoroughly documented the contents of the site, noting different ways that information can be better presented, or where else it may make sense to move it to. I used my investigation as a starting-off point for a training I developed and led targeting the current state of the website, and the next steps that needed to be taken to improve it. Since then and into the summer of 2022, I will be following that plan of action to create an improved user experience that will then be tested through student focus groups. The end goal of the project will be to present the web development team with a thorough, sustainable, and thoughtful blueprint for the website.

I was very grateful to get several opportunities during my role to carry out the project cycle from ideation to implementation, as I learned a lot about myself as a person but also as a leader. I found that I often underestimated the amount of work and time that goes into public health initiatives, and found it at times difficult to think of creative ways to dynamically engage students. By far my biggest takeaway from my experiences is the fact that any skill can be used towards the end goal of promoting a higher standard of health for a target population, and I enjoyed finding the ways that my web design skills intersected with that mission. As a result of my exposure to the topic, I am pursuing further training in web accessibility through the Teach Access Virtual Study Away Program.