Health Promotion at UM: Capstone Bootcamp Reflection – Barger Leadership Institute Student Voices

Health Promotion at UM: Capstone Bootcamp Reflection

Health Promotion at UM is a student organization that hopes to improve the health of all people, especially the underserved, through volunteering in the local community and educating the public, while also building a close-knit community for our members to passionately apply medicine and public health to better the lives of others. Our capstone team is Leo Thompson, Monna Meng, and Grace Tremonti.

Before Bootcamp, our main goal was sustainability. We felt that the BLI and their resources could really help us think of ways to make the organization last for a long time, both on campus and out in the community. Although we had brainstormed many broad ideas to approach this goal of “sustainability,” including facilitating our volunteer growth, improving our marketing and recruitment, and optimizing operations, we had not really thought about specific ways we were going to implement it, or what our priorities should be.

One way our idea evolved during Bootcamp was that we shifted from mainly logistical goals to actually wanting to change the culture of our organization, and begin to market Health Promotion as a venue to engage in meaningful, long term service. This shift was really inspired by the things we learned in bootcamp, like starting to evaluate our programs and reflect on what we really want people— both target communities and volunteers— to get out of partnering and working with Health Promotion.

Our idea has also become much more focused, in the sense that we now have a clear idea of how to actually implement and test some of the ideas that we have. One example of this is that through our workshop on literature review, we were able to pinpoint ways to test our ideas on member recruitment and marketing for the club. Bootcamp helped us discover the practical applications of our ideas and how to go about actually making them happen.

Aside from the logistical clarity, the BLI has provided us with during Bootcamp, we felt that preparing our pitch helped everyone on the team think deeply about their true purpose for pursuing the BLI Capstone for HPUM. Connecting with many experienced professionals has inspired us, given us many new ideas, and helped define our vision to a degree that would not have been possible without the bootcamp. We would have never imagined the direction of HPUM could change so much is such a short period, and we are really excited to see where our summer research takes us!

By, Leo Thompson, Monna Meng, and Grace Tremonti

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