| by Kristine Su
Passionate about science, medicine, and social justice, Corinne Bintz researched online for careers that integrated her interests. She stumbled upon the field of public health in which she learned how health differed at the population level compared to the individual level. Corinne was fascinated by the factors of inequities in health, applying to Middlebury because of its global health program.
Her first-year seminar taught by Professor Myers from the economics department was her first exposure to the interdisciplinary nature of global health. She learned how to utilize microeconomic practices and tools to analyze sexual health, preparing her to work as a research assistant with Professor Myers the next semester.
Corinne enjoys the variety of academic disciplines she has taken for the minor because it has taught her to consider global health issues from numerous perspectives: “How would a historian or economist approach this?” When she is assigned final research projects in her classes, she always selects a global health-related topic, giving her experience approaching problems with multiple informed perspectives.
Having a broad interdisciplinary view allowed Corinne to identify the role she wanted to partake in to address health disparities. After enrolling in a computer science course on a whim, she discovered an interest and passion for coding. Corinne was able to explore connections between global health and computer science through her internships at myStrength, a teletherapy app, and at the University of Washington the next summer, Corinne gained practice collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data. Her work contributed to the development of an algorithmic equity toolkit that promotes community oversight of public sector surveillance. Additionally, Corinne created a demo that displayed flaws in facial recognition technology such as racial and gender biases.
In her junior year, Corinne studied abroad in Stockholm, Sweden where she predominantly enrolled in global health classes which were able to count towards the minor. She enjoyed learning and engaging in experiential opportunities about health policy, noting that her visits to the headquarters of the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders were the highlight of her time abroad.
Corinne applied to be on the Student Advisory Council (SAC) because she wanted to encourage incorporation of data science and be involved with any future changes into the minor. This summer, she will be interning at Harvard University working on bioinformatics algorithms. The pandemic has made her internship remote, but she is very grateful that it was not canceled. The national health crisis has been stress-provoking and has placed some challenges on her educational resources and work management. However, she feels fortunate overall because she and her family are safe and healthy.
Her advice to students who are passionate about global health is to consider how its interdisciplinary nature readily allows for intersection of your interests. “What skills are interesting to me and what do I want to do with that? How can I bring that to global health?”
This article was featured in the Spring 2020 Global Health Newsletter.
| by Kristine Su
Quan Pham currently works at Kaiser Permanente as a Senior Consultant; his primary responsibilities are the development and execution of a new medical facility. He manages details, like the artwork and locations of sharps bins, to the overall objectives, such as patient flow and operational efficiency.
| by Kristine Su
Caroline Arthaud grew increasingly interested in creating a larger impact on health beyond nutrition and began studying global health. She appreciated that Middlebury emphasizes global health’s interdisciplinary nature, engendering Caroline to draw connections in her coursework as a psychology major with minors in global health and anthropology.
| by Christopher Donohue
Cassie Kearney is a current masters student at University of Michigan, seeking a masters in public health with a concentration in Health Behavior and Health Education. She recently graduated from Middlebury in the Spring of 2022.
