Reflection- Ryan Dewan
Implementing a public health stress intervention was something that I never thought I was going to do, especially teaching yoga to STEM students to help reduce stress. I learned that planning the intervention with the group deals with a lot of communication on all ends and creating a strict schedule to follow. Being a major where there is not a lot of collaboration it was nice to trust my group members and be able to split the project in a way where we all contributed evenly to create a successful intervention. In terms of implementing the intervention, I believe that was the hardest aspect of the project for a few reasons. First, determining where and when the intervention would be was harder than expected due to all of us having active and busy schedules. Finding a time when we were all available was one of the first hurdles. The second one was trying to recruit people for our intervention, with finals coming around the corner people are the busiest they have been all semester. Thus, making it harder to recruit the 15 people we wanted to participate in the intervention. When evaluating the intervention, I realized that it was a lot different from evaluating and analyzing data from other classes I took. The data we accumulated was both quantitative and qualitative, therefore it was a little bit more difficult to interpret the data from the intervention. But having that other aspect of data analysis has provided me with a greater holistic knowledge of data analysis and interpretation. If I were to implement another public health intervention, I would take more of an initiative to set hard deadlines for when each step should be completed. I would also like to have more attention to detail when creating the intervention creating a better intervention overall. Lastly, I would hope to work in a larger group to have more minds collaborate and generate better interventions or ideas that can benefit our intervention.
Reflection - Priya Bommaraju
I did not realize how much work is required in planning, implementing, and evaluating a public health intervention. It takes a lot of planning ahead for an intervention to go smoothly and it also takes contacts/resources to get people to actually come to an event/intervention. I personally did not have a lot of contacts that would have been able to attend the intervention, but having group members brought greater outreach and contacts to get people to attend our intervention. Working in a group helped make the intervention a success, and we were able to work well together through consistent communication and trust in one another's work and abilities. This project made me realize how much planning ahead is required for an intervention - choosing a target population and what the intervention will be and planning times, places, the logistics of the intervention. In the future, I would aim to schedule interventions ahead of time (booking rooms), sending more emails and flyers out to potential participants weeks or months in advance, and go into more detailed planning into what the intervention will entail. For our project, we had participants of the intervention complete the pre- and post-intervention surveys at the intervention which was essential in helping us evaluate the efficacy of the intervention. I would try to do the same in future interventions because I believe this allowed us to get the most feedback than having people complete the surveys on their own time and forgetting about it completely.
Reflection - Brynn Wittcop
What I discovered about developing, executing, and assessing a public health intervention is how innovative and out-of-the-box thinking is required. It also necessitates a significant amount of planning to create something well-thought-out and successful. Furthermore, having group members who can communicate effectively and contribute efficiently is critical in all aspects of the group endeavor. What I acquired from working in a group is how important communication is. Projects need a great deal of decision-making, planning, and time management. That, I believe, is what enabled my group to collaborate really well in order to accomplish our assignment successfully. Making personal interactions with your group members also helps and makes it simpler to work together, in my opinion. In future public health interventions, I would absolutely spend more time to efficiently setting out and arranging things in more detail. I also believe that increasing the number of participants in the intervention might result in significant improvements.