The Class of 2015 Speaks
May 19, 2015—Seven graduating students reflect on lessons learned, skills acquired, along with the perspectives that shaped their experience at the Mailman School and their plans for the future, from medical school and doctoral studies to a tech startup and overseeing tuberculosis outreach for an international health consultancy.
(See also a profile of MPH graduate John Bryan on Columbia University's Commencement 2015 site.)
Niels Bantilan
The semester after I started my MPH, I began taking engineering classes on the Morningside campus. There are a bunch of us here from different departments—we call ourselves the Public Health Data Scientists—and we were interested in complex systems and data science because it was empowering to build things with code. In my career, I want to develop technologies that are human-centered and help solve real-world problems. We often see technology used to solve “first world problems,” but I believe that it can make a positive impact in underserved populations.
In my Leadership and Innovation class, I had the winning idea for a social platform for teachers in New York. My ideas evolved into a search engine that automatically summarizes public health literature. Eventually, my passion to create something materialized into a startup called SUMIT that I co-founded with friends in SIPA and the Engineering School. SUMIT is a social enterprise that makes international development knowledge more open, accessible, and participatory. We’re aggregating the world’s international development knowledge, starting with the World Bank and UN data repositories. I like to describe it as the “Google Scholar for international development,” and building it will take the kind of complex systems thinking I learned in the Core. Our fundamental hypothesis is that if we make these documents more searchable, we would be helping funders, implementers, and evaluators get insights about best practices in the development industry so they can make better decisions on the ground.
Indira Behara
Growing up in Mumbai, I spent my whole life wanting to be a doctor, and that’s what I became. I’ve loved every moment, but after working in both public and private sector hospitals here in India, I realized that the problem wasn’t the number and quality of the access points for the 30-odd percent of our population in urban settings. The problem was a far greater and more widespread systemic issue: a majority of our largely semi-urban or rural population do not have access to affordable, good quality, effective care. Read more about Indira.
Jacob Brennan
My coursework in the Department of Health Policy and Management, the tools I was taught by my professors, the ideas I was exposed to, and the business acuity I gained here have been invaluable in growing from my past experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Guatemala towards my next phase as a management consultant in the healthcare advisory practice at Grant Thornton. Professors Paul Thurman and John Winkleman taught me how to think about the intersection of public health and business comprehensively. Read more about Jacob.
Erika Eitland
Hearing Dr. Joseph Graziano talk about how science could directly benefit populations around the world immediately had me hooked. The clear droplets I had been analyzing in my undergraduate stem cell lab research could not thrill me like environmental health sciences would.
During my time at Mailman, I worked at Public Health Solutions, where I was responsible for hosting community meetings that connected local organizations and farmers' markets. Read more about Erika.
Robyn Jordan
I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor, but it wasn’t until I got into my undergraduate major in Health and Societies that I realized I couldn’t be an MD without an MPH or an MPH without an MD. For me, the two are inextricably linked.
By the end of the summer of my junior year at the University of Pennsylvania, I had completed Mailman’s Biostatistics Enrichment Summer Training (BEST) Diversity Program. Read more about Robyn.
Tioluwa Olokunde
We talk a lot about the social determinants of health. My family and I can testify to this. We lost my sister to diarrheal disease at infancy. My brother left school and now has poor health from addiction to risky behaviors. Unlike most people who are challenged by unfavorably disparate socioeconomic structures, I have been blessed with the ability to turn my challenges into opportunities.
Before Mailman, I led public health projects in both rural and urban communities having no evidenced-based framework for my work or understanding of how to engage with the different dynamic parts of the health system. Now, my newly gained knowledge of program planning, system approaches and theories are already yielding fruit—something made possible through a scholarship from the World Bank. Last summer, I arrived in Ghana with the goal of creating a manual to address misconceptions and to help people recognize emergencies. After conducting my first qualitative study, I evolved the plan into a suite of materials that meet the needs of everyday life. It was a rewarding time of facilitating the process rather than telling people their problem and fixing it. This has earned me academic presentations, an award and two potential peer-reviewed publications, one of which has already been submitted.
After graduation, I will pursue work with the United Nations because I would be contributing to programs that affect the health of people on the population level. My dream is to lead culturally relevant implementation science within the health systems of developing countries.
Jonathan Shtaynberger
It’s essential to have a lot of different statistical approaches at your disposal, in order to most effectively work on the problem at hand. That’s one of the things that most impressed me about Mailman. In my classes, professors emphasized that it’s not enough to perform an analysis. We need to be able to explain the clinical significance and the impact of our results.
My favorite class, which was also the most challenging and the source of my lowest grade, was Generalized Linear Models. Read more about Jonathan.