Adriana Koilpillai
Bachelor of Science, Public Health Science
Adriana Koilpillai, a senior double major in Public Health Science and French, is one of two co-presidents of Public Health Beyond Borders. She has also served as the project leader of the India team for Public Health Beyond Borders for two previous semesters. The India team partnered with Southpoint grade school in Varanasi as well as Banaras Hindu University, which is in the northeast region of the country. Koilpillai and her team travel to Varanasi and administer public health related workshops based on need assessment surveys distributed to the community. In January 2024, she helped deliver stress alleviation and first aid workshops geared towards younger children as well as older students and teachers.
Koilpillai is a pre-med student with plans to practice international medicine as a Physician on local scales, particularly where there are less structured medical systems in place. Additionally, she wants to provide basic care to build up medical systems and create sustainable practices.
In one sentence, what is public health to you?
Public health is a mixture of social justice, activism and science, working to support communities that need it most with the goal of equity in mind, to support every individual.
What inspired you to study public health, and particularly, at UMD?
In terms of UMD, I always knew I wanted to go here because I had such a long journey ahead of me in terms of schooling. I’m also from Maryland so this is a good stepping stone into that.
For public health, my grandfather moved to the US from India when he was 19. He studied biostatistics and public health and then worked for the World Health Organization, but got his master’s here at the School of Public Health which is really cool. When he was 70, he retired and moved back to India to start a hospital and mobile clinics for women’s health. I grew up going back and forth and engaging from a really young age in public health and seeing all the good that he was doing for so many people. He also started an orphanage. So that was really inspiring to me. And so right from the get-go I knew I wanted to help people just from having grown up like that. Public health really gives me the options to help people in so many different kinds of ways, not just through medicine.
What person or experience has had the greatest impact on you during your degree program?
I would definitely say Public Health Beyond Borders I’ve been here for two years, but I have gotten so much out of it. Almost every single part of my resume has something that was given to me as an opportunity by Public Health Beyond Borders. Not only have I learned how to engage with public health on a global scale which is what I want to do with my career, I have also had the opportunity to present research, to conduct research, to write papers and to really see the tangible effect of the things that I’m doing on people, which is really inspiring.
How has your time at UMD’s School of Public Health shaped your career goals?
I would say that the students have really helped guide me. I’ve near a lot of really passionate people who are passionate about the same things that I am, like wanting to help people. And they’re all different kinds of pre-health tracks like pre-PA, pre-dental, or not at all. Like they really want to do public health practice in and of itself. So that opened my mind to all the possibilities that my career can have. I’m somebody who’s interested in a lot of things and it kind of gets overwhelming because I want to do everything. So, it kind of inspired in me the sense that I can do a little bit of everything if I really want to, I don’t have to limit myself.
What do you think is the biggest challenge that the public health field should be focusing on?
I think on a very basic level, providing basic necessities to everybody because the majority of individuals living in the world don’t have the things they need to sustain themselves. Food, water, even sanitary things. So I think that’s the biggest thing that needs to be addressed before anything else can be.