This winter quarter, I created my own class with Primary Investigator, Dr. Holly Harris, to investigate the association between Type 2 Diabetes-related biomarkers (insulin, adiponectin, glucose, IL-6, and HOMA-IR) with ovarian cancer risk.
Something I learned about myself during this independent study is that I am self-driven and curious when it comes to topics I enjoy. I am proud of myself for troubleshooting through code and persevering, even when code did not run, data seemed to big to handle, and I felt imposter syndrome with coding.
Something that I did not realize public health would bring me to is coding. I had always detached myself from coding because I didn't think it was for me, or that I even had the capability to do it. Here I am now, accepted in graduate school for MPH at the University of Washington in the Department of Epi, and I have been spending the past quarter learning how to code in Stata to inform health policy recommendations.
In this independent study, I was able to apply frameworks that I have been learning in public health to my epidemiological skills and something that I have been thinking about is using race as a covariate, especially in discussion in capstone when we have been talking about race vs racism as an exposure. Having the opportunity to apply these public health issues into real world public health application has been surreal, exciting, scary, and rewarding all at the same time.
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