How I got into my field

When I went to graduate school, I needed to find a job to help pay for my living expenses and to help me pay for school. I found a job studying health-care experiences for African Americans. I found that I loved doing research, interviewing people, studying past and current programs, and generally finding out about the problems and issues that African Americans face in trying to obtain quality health care. Although my degrees are in urban planning, my interests continued to draw me back to the medical and health fields.

What I like most about my work

I like networking with and meeting people who are in the health-care field. I enjoy learning new things and working on projects with teams. I am especially thankful for the opportunities to meet other African Americans who are leaders and prominent professionals in the health and medical field. I love the strong sense of pride that wells up inside of me to work with other African Americans on serious health issues and programs for all people but, in particular, for African Americans.

Volunteer or other experiences you might check out to learn about my field

To see if you like the broad health and medical field, I would suggest that you contact your local hospitals, nursing homes, hospice and home care organizations, the Red Cross, community clinics, or any other company or group that provides health and medical services to your community. See if you can be a volunteer. Or, you may even be able to get a part-time job. The best way to learn about these fields is to get involved. Luckily for us, our field often has many ways to use volunteers in an office setting, with education and outreach programs, and even in providing direct patient care services. By working in a hospital gift store, reading to children in a hospital, taking nursing home patients to activities, helping with newsletters in a hospice or clinic setting, or registering Red Cross blood donors, you get the chance to see people in the medical and health area.

Challenges and exciting changes I see in my field in the near future

Research-wise, funding for projects will continue to be highly competitive. An exciting area is the spin-off from applied research in terms of companies producing services, drugs, tools, and technology. A great concern is going to be making sure that new services, diagnostic tools and techniques, and treatments are available for those who historically do not benefit from medical and health-related advances. We also will see more and more interaction between fields as we solve problems and find new strategies for diagnosing, preventing and treating medical problems. An example is how engineers, doctors and researchers have worked so well together to design things like the new laser surgery tools, heart and lung machines, and computer programs to assist with genetic counseling. There is an amazing integration of science and research going on all over the medical and health field.

The kinds of training and education needed to keep up in my field

We are learning to value what we call qualitative and histographic research methods. I'll be happy to explain these to you in my presentation or if you come to job shadow with me! Basically, we are accepting the fact that numbers and lab quantitative studies must go hand in hand with understanding the "people" side of our studies and advances. We need to step back and note how our research can benefit a group of people, how we can share and encourage people to use our new knowledge and tools or services, and so promote advances for those populations and groups of people who often miss out on our benefits.

Other career fields where my skills could be put to use

Just as research and practice is integrating with different fields, my job skills and formal education can be utilized in many different areas. For instance, I could work with public health, health-care administration, medical history, and urban planning! We know that young people today will have somewhere between 4 to 6 very different job or career paths in their lives. What you study and where you work today will become building blocks for what you may do tomorrow. My degrees, work experiences, and changing interests have led me into very different jobs. What has remained across my experiences is my passion to understand and promote more African Americans going into medical and health careers and to at least indirectly help more people to know of and use health-care resources.