Intro to Public Health - Blog 1

Hey everyone!

My name is Dani DiPersia. I was born and raised on the Lower West Side of New York City and am currently living in Baltimore as a freshman at Johns Hopkins University. This semester I’m taking Introduction to Public Health and will be posting on this blog at least once a week on some of the various aspects of Public Health. I had never even heard of the field of Public Health until earlier in the year when I went to an open house in New York for students who had been accepted to the Class of 2014. There, I met two current students who were both majoring in Public Health. I was intrigued by what they both told me and decided to follow up on my curiosity when I came back to visit Hopkins on accepted students day in April. My interested was only furthered after attending the open house for the major and was what prompted me to sign up for this course. Officially, my major is undecided but I am leaning towards Public Health and I figured that this survey course would give me a broad and general understanding of the subject and would help me in my decision.

For those who may not know, the CDC defines public health as “to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury and disability.”  It focuses more on the population of a certain community rather than a single individual. The work that public health professionals engage in is more behind the scenes than doctors who treat patients. Another difference is the amount of government funding it receives. The money that is pumped into health care is exponentially larger than the money that public health gets.  

One of the first questions I was asked whenever I told anyone I was going to be attending Hopkins was, “Oh, so you’re going to be a doctor??” That was probably the one and only thing I was sure of when I came here. I don’t want to be a doctor. But what I do want is to be able to help people in some way and I feel like Public Health is one of the ways to achieve that goal. Whether it be creating preventive measures to help the greater community or teaching children in a rural village about living a sanitary lifestyle.

So far, I have really enjoyed the first couple of classes. Even though it was a huge amount of information being thrown at us for an hour and fifteen minutes each time, the material was extremely interesting to me and very engaging. One thing that I think is really cool is that even though it’s a fairly large class, a large part of the class ends up being discussion based. It’s not just a boring and dry lecture. The students have been asking thoughtful and challenging questions that have really pushed the entire class to think. It is honestly my favorite and most interesting class this semester and I look forward to learning more and more about public health and to posting on this blog each week!