Ģ����ý

Organic chemistry has a reputation as one of the most challenging undergraduate course offerings, even for chemistry majors. Community health major Lauren Witke �23 looks back on her time in organic chemistry from an unusual viewpoint.

�It was fun. You learn to love it,� she said.

One contributor to her fond memories of organic chemistry and her success in similarly challenging courses has been the relationships she forged with her professors.

�They�ve all been so supportive and helpful. They want you to succeed, even if you�re not specializing in the sciences.�

The promise of those relationships drew Witke to Ģ����ý in the first place. She transferred after her first year at a large state university.

�I was sitting in a lecture with 100 of my closest friends. I felt like a number. I wanted smaller classes, to get to know my professors, to find more ways to get involved on campus without getting lost in the shuffle � and that what I�ve done at Ģ����ý.�

In addition to immersing herself in campus life by serving on the activities board, student government and orientation team, Witke has fully immersed herself in the academic opportunities around her � leading her to take challenging classes to feed her intellectual curiosity.

Witke chose community health as a major partly because of its broad interdisciplinary scope. Instead of focusing on a minor, she opted to take extra lab sciences along with other classes that sparked her interest.

�I�ve taken a lot of psychology classes, for example. I took a lot of sciences too. This semester I�m taking a history class, �The American Experiment� and a humanities class on pandemics in literature,� she said. �A well-rounded education is important to me, and I think it makes me a better problem solver.�

Community health is all about problem-solving, assessing the needs of a population, determining how to fill those needs, then executing those strategies and solutions.

�I love program planning, doing the research and figuring out strategies to address an issue. For example, in my internship on campus, I highlighted meaningful self-care, which is such an important thing that we need in college and after college too,� said Witke.

While grad school is likely in her future, Witke wants to expand her work experience first, building on her on-campus internship addressing health education efforts and her off-campus internship doing patient outreach and engagement for a medical practice.

 �A lot of community health strategy is multidisciplinary, implementing and evaluating plans to reach a goal,� Witke said. �In medicine, you treat the individual, but that individual lives in the context of the community. In community health, we look for the root cause that may not be obvious. I want to see the larger picture and address what is needed at the community level.�