EQ: How are various healthcare facilities around the world dealing with COVID-19, and how can understanding this help make the healthcare system more fair and equitable for all?
Throughout these past six weeks, I feel like I dove and successfully answered my essential question to my liking. Unfortunately, I don’t think there will be an answer to my question as it is opinionated; although it might differ from person to person, one of my goals for my solutions was to include everyone. I am proud and confident from my work since everything that is happening right now is impermanent and in constant change – new information keeps replacing the old or new information is giving us a new path.
My original essential question was: How do various healthcare facilities operate and how can understanding this infrastructure help make the healthcare system more fair and equitable for all? My goal was to work in different healthcare facilities and to pick up on key ideas and interview employees. Although the question is similar to the one now, if it weren’t for the pandemic, I feel like I would have not been able to answer my question, lacked information, and had a different outcome. But due to these circumstances, I adjusted my expectations. As much as I would have loved to work with doctors and been in the action, I created a different project under a similar question based solely on research. However, if I had a choice to pick my essential question again, I would pick something different and focus more on what I want to do in the future. I chose something in the medical field but I maybe would have chosen a topic related to biology rather than public health.
The reason why I chose this project was that I wanted to get a general idea of what medical studies could look like. When I go to college I plan on majoring in health science and I was hoping for this project to push me to realize what I wanted to do in the future as well as just making me aware of how our healthcare system works. I also hoped to help my academic ability as I would have learned something new that is outside of the LREI curriculum. Throughout this journey, I not only learned about different healthcare systems and how they run but also learned about myself. These included my college decision, what I want for my future, as well as learning and studying habits.
Through these past six weeks, I faced many challenges as well as successes. I had tough patches but also breakthroughs of information. At times, I was at a place of feeling bored and the feeling of not wanting to complete my project. However, during those times, I focused on other topics of my project, for instance, I became bored with doing pure research, and instead, I planned out my survey paper and put it together and then went back to research after a week or so. After that week, new information was posted or a major headline came out that I could dive into. Another challenge that I faced was because COVID-19 is novel, there was no clear concrete information on the topic. The information I was finding was in news articles that aren’t always reliable. It was late-march that I found my first research paper on the topic. Then, I started feeding on research papers that gave me rich information to use for my final product. Originally my final project was going to be a concept map and mapping out my information but due to COVID-19, I decided to put it into a paper. It was a tough decision but I thought it would be easier for everyone to comprehend and for my work to be shared with the public. However, I have grown from this project and learned that I can accomplish more than I believed too. This project made me aware of growing up, being independent, what does and doesn’t work, and to manage my time. I thought researching would be exhausting since I would be constantly spending hours on end on a computer, however, once I got into the mood and vision I planned for that day, I completed it. I had a doctor who I was supposed to intern with, be my mentor which significantly helped. He gave me insight and updates of articles he found that would help struct my product. The 20 hours a week paid off and now I am excited to show what I learned.
My project influenced my vision of our country through a different lens. I originally thought the U.S had good ideas on certain concepts, but looking at the infrastructure of other countries made me change my opinion. We are behind. My project also brought up one of the topics I learned from taking constitutional law with Ann and that is, we usually agree with the side that we favor and look away from the other side. However, throughout my project, I had to put my mindset in other perspectives and create a solution to fix the healthcare system that would benefit them as well. This is similar and relates to the upcoming election as healthcare is a major political topic.
As much as I loved my project and learning about new material, I don’t think I could create a career out of it. The topics that I was researching were quite intriguing however, I did notice that I got caught up on the biology of vaccines, immunoglobulins/antibodies, and coronavirus’. In the future, I feel like I would benefit from learning biology or biochem to help others. I also enjoyed the survey I conducted which generated a space that I could reconnect/create with friends and family who don’t live in NY. I also recently started to tutor a child whose parent(s) works in the healthcare system. Again it’s a reconnection of helping out and speaking to new people. I knew that I liked working with people and helping out before this project, but I felt like one of the goals for the project was to step out of my comfort bubble and to take on the real world. Although I combined the two, I loved it. Now that the project is over, I hope everyone has the chance to check out everyone’s work and learn about what they put hard work into for these past six weeks.