Hi there! My name is Greta Kruse, and I am a rising senior majoring in international studies and anthropology. I am so excited to be a part of the Women and Gender Summer Fellowship this year and have already experienced a lot in the past two weeks. The project I’m working on is titled “Preventing HIV/STI Among Urban Adolescents via a mHealth Primary Care Intervention”. I was really interested in this work during my project search because I’ve always felt passionate about public health, especially in regard to reproductive justice, and haven’t engaged with any work in the public health field in or outside the classroom. Getting this opportunity to explore my interests has made me reflect on the value of my liberal arts degree and the breadth of careers I could potentially pursue one day.
So far for my project, I’ve begun doing some preliminary literature searches relating to topics connected to HIV/STI prevention in youth as well as interventions into vulnerable populations. I’ve also begun doing data coding (which I thought you had to be a computer science major to do – nope) of survey responses from an intervention tool. Even though all this study information is kept in databases and excel sheets, it still felt very human to go through the survey answers of actual adolescents and work to protect their privacy through the coding process. I’m looking forward to working with more data like that as the summer progresses.
While it sometimes is a bit of a bummer to still be all virtual this summer, I also am afforded a lot of flexibility with my schedule which has made things low stress, and I am very appreciative of that. I also am so happy to be working with such a great cohort of folks this summer in WAGS and can’t wait to see the work we all do!
Thanks for reading!
-Greta