Executive Summary/Abstract
From June 2010 to September 2010 I interned at Bixby Center located at the University of California, San Francisco. The Bixby Center is a leader in reproductive health research and a pioneer in applying innovative concepts to the field. They investigate cutting edge and affordable solutions reproductive health problems.
Leah Maddock, MPH was my preceptor and mentor. She welcomed me to the Bixby Center and treated me as a contributing member of her team. Leah manages numerous projects at the center and invited me to work on a number of projects. Dr. Claire Brindis is the Principle Investigator of the projects I worked on; she is also the director of the Bixby Center. Both Dr. Brindis and Ms. Maddock took on the mentor role and guided me through the internship process.
I worked on the following projects: The Wellness project (also called Teen Voices), Girls Health, School Based Health Centers (SBHC), and Preventing Teen Pregnancy. I also organized and led collaborative meetings for a couple of teams at UCSF. These five comprehensive projects involved data coding, content analysis, curriculum development, and policy review, developing a teen pregnancy prevention proposal, planning and leading a series of information sharing meetings. All of the projects were very intensive, and revolved around creating healthier environments for adolescents through research and application. These projects gave me the opportunity to explore concepts that I learned in the classroom and apply them in practice.
For the Wellness project I coded dozens of transcripts and explored different methods of calculating inter coder reliability. For the Girls Health project, I did a policy review of violence initiatives and examined numerous websites. The Office of Women’s Health funded this study to ultimately receive recommendations for the development, launch, and evaluation of a National Girl-Adolescent Health and Wellness Initiative. For the School Based Health Centers project, I investigated and created a curriculum using already existing curricula, but responsive to the specific needs of our project. It involved crafting an 8 unit curriculum for the UCSF team to use to teach high school students how to do a needs assessment investigating their communities interest, attitudes, and desires for a school based health center.
In addition, I attended a series of Teen Pregnancy Prevention collaborative meetings hosted by Alameda County. The overall objective of these meetings was to develop a Teen Pregnancy Prevention intervention pilot program in Alameda County. I taught the group how to write a logic model, and we ultimately produced one. Finally, I organized a series of informational sharing meetings. The objective of these meetings was to share projects with teams from the Bixby Center and the Institute for Health Policy Studies. At our third meeting I, along with three other members of the Wellness team, presented our project and findings. Working at the Bixby Center was a wonderful experience; I met experts in the field who guided me and helped me develop many skills that I expect to use in my career.
Shayna Tasoff
Advisor: Jessica Gipson, Ph.D.
September 7, 2010