A convo with an associate dean...

So as we're rounding the 3rd heading towards home plate at the end of the semester, I realized that I had more blogging to do. I couldn't believe that with all my news briefs and side stories, I still had more! But blogging, here I come!

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I didn't decide to interview Dr. Robert Galen, associate dean and professor of epidemiology, until much later in the course of my interviewing. But he helped me put my story together and it revolved around the training of students and their efforts in the community.

His quotes were stiff and sounded very PR-ish, but sturdy in all.

We started off by talking about the Archway Public Health Initiative — a position created in a community to meet the public health needs of the area.

"We want to facilitate the connectivity of the faculty of the College of Public Health and the community resources that are needed for their expertise," Dr. Galen said. "So we created a position for Archway public health position who must have a MPH (Masters of Public Health) degree and that MPH person will start very soon and live and work in Sandersville, Washington County."

He said the positions could be congruent with farm agents, extension agents, 4-H agents and other different extension agents.

So that's great. We know where they are. And... that they have to have a MPH. What do they DO?

"The role of the Archway public health professional is to do a needs assessment of public health and health problems in the community to aggregate resources in the community that could be mobilized, facilitate communication between resources in the community and play the key land grant role of our institution," Galen said.

OK. Now at least we have a better idea.

Galen said he Archway position, and similar positions, could help with research, too.

"What we hope is that the Archway public health professional, or the public health professional in town, or students on internships as they learn about the problems when placed on internships, will turn to the professors they had in the classroom and make their problems known to the faculty," Galen said.

"Hopefully some of the faculty will find challenging research opportunities around those problems and with that faculty will then move out of this building (Coverdell) and into the community to do what is referred to as community-based research and the by-product is that it will help solve real problems in the community."

So now we have a picture of their roles and contributions to the community and academic world.

Let's send people out, have them report back, and base our research off what they tell us. And now it appears students play a larger role than I previously thought. They aren't just learning... they're brainstorming research ideas for the faculty.