Many of our students attended this year’s meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), held in Atlanta, November 4 – 8. What follows is a post from one of these attendees.
By Alejandra Leyton, MPH
As a first-time participant at APHA, I decided to seek advice on how to seize this opportunity. While a diversity of messages was received, “not my favorite conference” was the one that struck me the most. The overwhelming number of exhibits, and oral and poster presentations was the main reason some colleagues couldn’t enjoy the number one conference of Public Health professionals in the U.S. This sounded like a challenge, but always having a bottle of water, a working app, comfortable shoes, and the desire to connect with others who share my same interests has allowed me to rate APHA as “I will definitely come back next year!”
The interactive format of the Greg Alexander Speed Networking breakfast was perfect to learn about the research of 30+ maternal and child experts in less than 60 minutes. Even when it seemed that the 1.5 minutes per introduction was not enough time to get to know someone’s work, it allowed me to connect with an expert in the methods I have been trying (but failing) to learn for the past year; as well as to find a dataset that could be useful for my dissertation. With similar experiences during the oral presentations, the last night at APHA I found myself having dinner with two strong, smart, and motivated PhD students from University of Maryland. The fact that we met at APHA for the first time did not stop us from talking about ways on how we could write papers together, and by doing so, bring our institutions together.
Finally, while oral presentations presented the perfect opportunity to admire, critically assess and excitedly learn from top notch researchers, I would like to share my favorite experience. During an International Health session, we learned that women in rural Guatemala reject Pap smears when pregnant, fearing that the baby could get a disease from the sample collection. Therefore, providers do not even offer the service to pregnant women anymore. This opened the floor for waves of questions, comments and suggestions: What is the role of health providers as educators? When will we shift from pap smears to HPV tests for women in remote locations? Why are some leaders only aiming for one pap smear in a woman’s lifetime? Not only was the discussion exciting and energizing, but it also reminded me that although we have endless problems affecting people’s and communities’ wellbeing, there are also endless possibilities to help them through policy, supply side interventions, and behavior change approaches.
Alejandra Leyton is a third-year PhD student in the department of Global Community Health and Behavioral sciences. With a background in Economics, her research interests include the triangulation of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, women’s health, behavior change, and health inequalities among vulnerable populations.
