Tulane SOM Pharmacology blog

 TOTAL HOURS: 3 hours Leukemia and Lymphoma Society: 3 hours I volunteered for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society LLS Student Visionaries of the Year Grande Finale to help organize the event. Student Visionaries of the year is a leadership program for High School Students. This event involved students from all over Lousiana, with 15 teams competing to raise funds and awareness for LLS's mission to overcome blood cancers. It is a 7-week program, that culminates with the Grand Finale event which was a gala with a silent auction, and a live program announcing the winners.  LLS's goals and values resonated with me as they strive to invest billions of dollars into cancer research and provide free educational resources and programs for patients. I personally have family who has been through chemotherapy and struggled with the difficulties of cancer treatment and the uncertainty that comes with a diagnosis. Thus, participating in this event, and helping provide resources and education

 February Blog post: TOTAL HOURS: 3 hours RESULTS - meeting 2 hours I attended a meeting as part of the public health organization RESULTS. During the meeting, we discussed planning meetings with local members of Congress, to present the organization to them.  RESULTS Letter to the Editor - 1 hour  I wrote a letter to the editor, which I submitted to the Dallas Morning News for the opinions section, about tuberculosis. In my letter, I appealed to members of Congress to sign onto a bill in order to pass an act called the End TB Now Act, which  authorizes actions, including the provision of international assistance, to combat tuberculosis by the U.S. government, and allows the president to provide international  assistance for the prevention, treatment, control, and elimination of tuberculosis. The act also allows the President to establish goals for U.S. efforts to detect, cure, and prevent all forms of tuberculosis globally. My letter can be found below: Tuberculosis is a bacterial res

Volunteering hours: 6 hours  Challah Bake: 5 hours On Sunday, January 22nd, I helped organize a challah bake through the Chabad organization. I helped set up the event, and prepare the dough for all the participants to make challah. All those who attended helped make challah that was then donated to Food Share NOLA. This was a learning opportunity for me, as I learned how to bake challah, and I had the pleasure of participating in this event for a good cause. I was originally not a part of the organizing committee, but I had time that I wanted to give for this cause, and decided to arrive early to help organize the event. It gave me great joy to help Chabad and to help organize this event to ensure that enough challot were cooked to donate to Food Share NOLA! RESULTS global health organization: 1 hour The group RESULTS advocates for public health to members of congress and brings matters to their attention. I attended the first meeting of the year during which we planned out the roadma

 December Volunteering Hours: 1 I attended a meeting as part of my public health volunteer organization called RESULTS and discussed the importance of getting members of Congress to sign on to the End TB now act, to help decrease the global burden of tuberculosis by providing funding to low-income countries. I have also started planning to meet with the new member of congress who has been recently elected and will be sworn in this coming January.  I will be planning a meeting with Jasmine Crockett, Dallas, Texas district 30 newest representative to describe RESULTS to her team.  On another note, I successfully completed my American Citizenship Test in early December and will become an American Citizenship once I attend my Naturalization ceremony! It has been a great semester, I have greatly enjoyed my first semester in this Master's program in Pharmacology and am looking forward to the coming semester starting in January 2023!

 TOTAL SEMESTER volunteering hours : 14 hours  Volunteering hours: 2hr  I attended a meeting as part of the public health organization I am a part of called RESULTS. The National Webinar discussed the importance of Letters to the Editor and Op-Eds to obtain media coverage and enable widespread sharing of information about infectious diseases and poverty.  A letter to the editor should be structured in a specific way and must be very concise, as most newspapers only allow 250-word long submissions. RESULTS recommends that volunteers begin the letters with a call to action; one of the current actions would be for Congress to pass the End TB now act before the end of the year. Then, the letter must include the importance of the issue and why it matters. This part can include examples, relevant data, and a story to make the facts more credible. The letter should end with a local or timely hook that connects the issue to something relevant to the community you are living in.  My goal for th

 October Blog post: Total volunteering: 8 hours Girls in STEM volunteering On Saturday, October 29th, I volunteered for Girls in STEM at Tulane University in the Boggs Center for Energy and Biotechnology. I started the day by leading a group of middle school girls in a fun science scavenger hunt, where they went through rooms and were introduced to scientific topics in engaging ways. One of the activities was understanding the RNA codons for translation to amino acids. They were given the table with the correspondence of RNA nucleotides to the one-letter amino acid codes. Then, I led a large group of 10 girls who were in the red stars group, to do more science activities with Tulane science professors.  The first activity involved learning about plant cells and analyzing them under a microscope, as well as looking at buccal cells.  The next activity was learning about primates with a professor and Ph.D. students who work at the Tulane primate center. They taught through interactive act