Tulane SOM Pharmacology blog

 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 ...

 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 i...

Blog Post September volunteering Feed the Hungry: 2 hours  On Saturday, September 24th I volunteered through the Tulane School of Medicine Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program to participate in an annual event. The event was called Feed the Hungry with the goal of preparing 500 meals to support the local New Orleans community to prepare, package, and deliver meals for people living in shelters. Feed the hungry was an event organized by members of the genetics BMS graduate program under a partnership with Pious Projects of America, which is a nonprofit organization that aids and responds to global humanitarian causes. The crises supported by the organization include emergency relief, food and water, and education. I helped prepare and package sandwiches that were subsequently delivered to homeless shelters to help the local New Orleans community and reduce food insecurity.  Volunteering my time to help provide food for members of the community I now belong to allowed me to refl...