At this time, I have just completed my second year as a health science major at Northeastern. I am currently on the pre-med track and hope to become a doctor in the future. I have known for a long time that this is the career path that I want to follow and have narrowed my interests to women’s health; I see a need for the field to have strength and support, especially as we move forward in this political climate. The current literature in this field is mostly focused on how to improve the overall health of women as well as how to increase access. While I have yet to directly engage in this conversation, I go on my first co-op in the Spring and hope to do research in this area. However, through this writing course, I found I was able to engage more meaningfully with my community and learn about how they communicate. I mainly learned this through online forums like Reddit for public health related topics and through journal articles and research for communicating scientific research. By exploring these resources, I have become more connected with my community and feel that I have become more aware of current issues that are common topics among women’s health providers.

My delve into common resources that are studied across both women’s health and public health helped me to hone my skills when pursuing a topic and finding appropriate sources that complemented the topic of choice (Goal 5). For the first assignment, the discourse community project, I had difficulties finding a site that talked about both my interests, and many of the websites were not active enough with which to write an entire paper. Therefore, when I decided to choose the subreddit on public health, I liked the site but was a little worried about how unconventional it is in some ways. For example, not all users write with proper grammar and it is unclear what qualifications some users had to talk with authority about certain subjects. However, the popularity and activeness of the site ended up supplying a significant amount of material to work with and I was able to discover a resource moving forward with my career as there were many helpful tips and advice posted on the page. Additionally, for the researched writing project, which focused on the same topic of transgender fertility, I was able to further develop these research skills. When I began the assignment I knew the topic on which I wanted to focus, but was worried about the quality and quantity of research that had been conducted in this area since transgender people are often left out of medical research and conversation. Ultimately, I ended up using some foreign articles and focusing on ways health care providers could improve their care so as to become more inclusive.

Another skill I felt I developed was Goal 10, which is being a helpful editor to peers and providing meaningful feedback. In previous classes, whenever I was assigned to do peer reviews, I would always focus more on grammatical and surface level edits that I could easily make. However, the fact that this class challenged us to go deeper by prompting us with questions to ask about the text was very helpful. For example, with one peer on the researched writing project, I felt I was able to give very meaningful comments to help her develop her draft such as needing to explain her sources in more detail and to accurately cite the research she used. I actually got an email from this student asking me to clarify the points I made during my peer review which was great because I was able to be more clear and I believe that these comments did make the student more aware of ways she could improve her assignment. Ultimately, I think her final draft was made stronger and she made a more cohesive argument that more expertly pulled in her sources to support her argument. Doing this also allowed me to interact more deeply with the text and assignment, and better understand where I could improve my own writing.

Overall, my favorite assignment was the researched writing project. While I was often frustrated and confused while working on it, and even though I found it difficult to isolate my thesis and pull out the most meaningful data from my research, I really loved the topic. I was grateful to this class for letting me explore the topic of transgender fertility because I had previously taken a course on reproductive justice and there was still more about this topic that I wanted to learn. Especially since that class mostly focused on theory, it was a great opportunity to interact with the topic on a more scientific level. At first, this shift in perspective was challenging because I wanted to say that all healthcare providers should be doing this and write more of an opinion/outrage piece regarding how the medical establishment is ignoring such a large community. However, in my search for resources, a particular essay about clinics in Sweden stood out by including ways that they were challenging the cisnormative health care that was traditionally provided. For example, the article explained that the staff had recently gone through training on how to better assist transgender fertility and ways they could make their office a more welcoming space through posters and inclusive medical forms. Previous to this project, I had not thought about the actual change that could be made to improve transgender healthcare. Ultimately, I was proud that I was able to learn about this topic, and communicate real actions health care providers could take.

As I move into my next semester of classes for Summer 2 and the Fall, I will definitely take these skills that I have strengthened with me, especially as I move into upper-level health science classes that require researched writing. After that, I am applying to my first co-op which I will begin in the Spring. I hope to be doing research working on improving women’s health. I do not know yet whether it will be medical or public health research, but, either way, the research and writing I have completed in this class will be very helpful going forward with my college career and beyond.