A Letter to your Future Self – Buu-Hac Nguyen

 

Dear future self,

As you know, my name is Buu-Hac Nguyen. To my friends, Buu. I am a first-generation college student and rising senior studying Biology, Health, and Society with a minor in Gender and Health at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I transferred to U-M after my freshman year at a New York state school. Coming from a big Vietnamese-American family of five girls and a single dad, I did not want to move far from home. However, after my freshman year, I wanted more opportunities and ended up at U-M! I am incredibly grateful to study at U-M and be a part of WAGSFP this summer! 

Contributing to my upbringing and background, my greatest interests lie in maternal health and health disparities within ethnic minorities and low-income communities. My summer research project regards developing a clinically relevant core outcome set to standardize outcome selection across future studies on the frequency of prenatal visits and method of delivery of prenatal care.  We will use a survey method to determine key stakeholders’ perspectives of critical core outcomes for prenatal care. This will inform a final core outcome set that will be finalized in a virtual consensus meeting. I will be under the mentorship of Dr. Alex Peahl who I am lucky to have worked with for almost two years. For my summer research project, I will be learning about the current prenatal care protocols, creating the surveys, communicating with key stakeholders, and summarizing the data. I hope to gain more knowledge in the current prenatal care protocol and how this core outcome set will improve future studies. I expect challenges in reading some papers given they can be lengthy and complicated. To combat this challenge, I will give myself enough time to read papers so I can understand them, rather than rush through them. I believe my 5 years of research experience, my work experience as a medical scribe in obstetrics & gynecology, and my academic discipline in Gender and Health will benefit my research project.

I am excited to read back on this post and will have hopefully grown as a researcher!

Yours truly,

Buu-Hac Nguyen