Global Health Case Competition
This year I joined the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health’s Student Advisory Council (VIGH SAC) and have been working on the Global Health Case Competition team. The VIGH SAC is a partnership between undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals in global health working together to promote knowledge about global health on campus and share resources. I am interested in a career in global and public health and applied to the council as a way to gain more hands-on experience in the field, as well as to build connections with professionals and graduate students who could help advise me when choosing career plans.
Throughout my time on the VIGH SAC, I worked on writing the case for the Global Health Case Competition (GHCC). The GHCC is a yearly competition where students are given a prompt about an emerging global health crisis; this year it was mortality rates in Guyana. The students then have a week to develop a solution to the issue and present their idea to a panel of judges at the end of the week, during the big GHCC event! Not only was working on writing the case that the students had to solve extremely rewarding when I saw the solutions that people came up with, it was also very helpful for figuring out my career interests. I really enjoyed working on the case, and this was very similar work to what I would be doing in the global health field, so I was able to figure out a possible career path for myself without doing an internship for a whole summer. During the research phase of writing the case, I was also able to make many connections with professionals in the community that I can reach out to with any questions about global health in the future! At Vanderbilt there are many organizations like this in multiple disciplines that help students figure out their interests and develop networks in those fields, be sure to check them out!
