Word of Mouse

With its new student blog project, the School of Public Health hopes to make meaningful virtual connections with prospective students

By Andrew Bacskai

Students from the School of Public Health (SPH) left Minnesota last summer for distant lands and simultaneously entered the blogosphere, allowing those left behind to join in their adventures.The blogosphere is the world of blogs and a blog (derived from “web log”) is a “virtual campfire” (a place on the Internet) where individuals with common interests record events, opinions and impressions that can then be read by others.

SPH’s inaugural class of student bloggers logged dispatches detailing their field experiences in such locations as Kenya, Ghana, Chile, Thailand and Mexico. Their “Notes From the Field,” featured on the SPH home page (www.sph.umn.edu), offer personal and unabashedly honest accounts of what it’s like to apply classroom learning to realworld public health scenarios.

For example, Mindy Rostal, a veterinary medicine student who’s also pursuing a Master of Public Health, writes from Kenya of her work on a project designed to identify the local source of the deadly Rift Valley Fever virus that has infected livestock and poses a threat to the human population. Meanwhile, Ele Scherman, who’s majoring in environmental health sciences, chronicles her attempts to help improve food safety in Ghana. Their entries, and those posted by their fellow students in the field, are seasoned by an assortment of  Americansabroad adventures, including a Dengue fever scare, a futile search for a serviceable toilet and run-ins with assertive Chilean women.

“The students who did the blogs were so honest and open about their experiences, as well as some of the struggles and challenges they encountered, which made it very real,” says Joan Pasiuk, SPH director of student services. “But I think what comes out loud and clear is the amount of learning that’s taking place.”

All SPH students are required to complete summer field experiences, which last from a few weeks up to four months and are customized to students’ interests and concentration areas. Pasiuk says she advises prospective SPH students to read the blogs for a glimpse into what their futures could hold. “It’s hard to talk about public health theoretically. Hearing the story, I think, is always the most valuable way to identify with the possibilities,” she says.

Blogging is a form of online journaling that has surged in popularity over the past decade. Mark Engebretson, SPH director of electronic communications, devised the student blog program as a low-cost, potentially high-impact marketing and recruitment tool for the school.

“We need to supplement our outreach to prospective students with the tools that they’re using today. They’re using MySpace and Facebook, and we need to bridge that gap,” Engebretson says. The cost of launching and maintaining “Notes From the Field,” he adds, is miniscule. “It was really just my time. We didn’t have to do any web development because the University libraries had already developed the blog space” called U Think, which is available to University students, staff and faculty. U Think debuted in April 2004 and recently eclipsed 40,000 entries.

Moving forward, Engebretson has enlisted a team of on-campus student bloggers—some of whom are equipped with iPods for producing pod casts—to chronicle the experience of being a public health student and living in the Twin Cities. “Our recruiting goals are to move beyond being a regional school,” he says. And first-person accounts from existing students, he adds, could help draw more  international students and students from the coasts who might associate Minnesota only with cold and snow.

Says Engebretson: “This is a way to show prospective students what our students are doing in an authentic way.”