One year ago today, the first post on healthou.wordpress.com was published. Since then we have posted 54 entries and have had over 4500 site views. This project is truly a labor of love and we look forward to continuing to serve prehealth students by providing practical information on the admissions process, and motivation and inspiration through the stories of our alumni. As always, feel free to contact us at healthou.org@gmail.com and let us know how we can serve you better and, if you find the information we provide helpful, spread the word. A special thanks to all of our alumni and friends who have shared their stories and have helped to make this project a success thus far.
We’re excited that you plan to continue utilizing this resource in the upcoming year. The last half of 2011 was an exciting one for us! We successfully launched healthou.wordpress.com on August 31 with our inaugural post Why So Few Blacks in Medicine, and since then have posted over 22 entries featuring information relevant to pre-health students navigating the process to professional school.
Some other highlights include:
1. Installation of two medical student bloggers, KeAndrea a first year and NaTacha a 3rd year.
3. Remembered World Aids Day with Oakwood alum and current SNMA president, Michael Knight.
2011 was not only exciting for us, but also for the Oakwood Biology Department who had tremendous success at the 2011 ABRCMS conference, where they secured 9 awards; saw their largest graduating class ever, and received multiple acceptances to professional school.
In the coming months, we hope to continue to provide relevant information, motivation, and inspiration to you; our readers. We will talk about finding love and balancing relationships during professional school, discuss the importance of mentorship, feature some of our “medical families”, and continue to hear the personal experiences of our student bloggers Tacha and KiKi as they finish up 3rd and 1st year.
We are excited about what 2012 has to offer and hope that you will continue to utilize the resources we provide throughout this year. If there is any topic or feature, that you would like to know more about, or question you may have to help you successfully enter the next phase of your career, do not hesitate to contact us at healthou.org@gmail.com or on our facebook page. Be sure to spread the word to your colleagues if you find our content to be valuable.
So, for the past week, as my mind has been fried and ready for vacation, my current distraction has been trolling the stats for the HealthOU blogsite. 🙂 Last week I checked and there were almost 900 views, and now, rather than read about listeriosis for tomorrow I checked and ….(drum roll please) 1008!!! And in just over 2 months! I’m so excited even more than I thought I would be. This project is a “baby” of mine and I am thankful to have an audience that appreciates or at least reads the posts. My hope is that I will be given the appropriate platform to advise and mentor motivated pre-professional students and that I’ll do an effective job.
Until then, please continue to check out our posts and please please please let us know if there’s anything you wanna know more about or how HealthOU can help you specifically on your journey to success. Also, special thanks and appreciation to Natacha Pierre and KeAndrea Titer who blog once a month and bring their personal perspectives to the project.
Thanks and happy reading (now back to work, to keep bringing you valuable info, and reading about listeria somewhere in there)
Help me welcome, two new contributors to HealthOU, Ms. Natacha Pierre and Ms. KeAndrea Titer.
Tacha is a Haitian sensation, who LOVES to travel. She’s lived in Korea, visited more countries than she can count on her hands ( and maybe even feet) and loves trying new things. She brings with her the unique perspective of being an international medical student. After doing her pre-clinical years in England and St. Maarten, she is now starting her clinical training. She’s a great writer, very insightful and is sure to bring both entertaining and informative information to HealthOU.
Our second contributor / blogger is KeAndrea ( KiKI) Titer, a first year medical student at Loma Linda University School of Medicine. She hails from Florida and carries a contagious passion for helping to increase the number of successful grad / professional school applicants from Oakwood University. She along, with other members of the outgoing senior class in the Biology department took an active role in trying to motivate and advise underclassmen about the tools for success when applying to medical / dental school. She’s excited about living in California and getting one step closer to pursuing her dream and the one thing she can’t live without (after God, of course) is cookie dough ice cream 🙂
Please join me in welcoming them both to the HealthOU family and be sure to check out their first posts in the coming weeks!
I”m excited that you’ve come to check us out. The official launch for the blog is not for another few weeks as we do the final preparations to make this site valuable to all who will view it.
It is our goal to be a source of support for Oakwood students past and present who are navigating through the medical profession. We have long had the reputation of being “one of the top 10 undergraduate institutions to get African Americans into medical school”, but we can and should strive to do even better. This site will provide support, networking opportunities, and practical advice on how to successfully enter AND complete professional education in the field of healthcare.
Our focus will not be limited to medical and dental school. We hope to provide information about the variety of options that exist in healthcare that are outside of those fields.
We are blessed to have an amazing network of medical professionals who once called Oakwood home, and so, we hope to tap into that immensely valuable resource; all in an effort to increase the number of minorities in healthcare and ultimately to bring glory to God through the ministry of healing.
Thank you for your interest and continued support.
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