Minoring in humanities, health and medicine behavioral and community health graduate Temitope Akinbiola is working to become a nurse practitioner. She will begin her masters for nursing in the fall at Johns Hopkins University. Akinbiola is passionate about helping communities in need and was awarded the Margaret W. Bridwell, which provided her financial support during her internship at African Women's Cancer Awareness Association, where she spent an entire semester working on community outreach and also learning the mechanics of working with a nonprofit organization.
What inspired your degree in community health?
I've always kind of known healthcare was my calling. Originally when I was on the pre med track, I knew that biology was not the way I wanted to go. I wasn't really a big heavy science person. I liked interacting, communicating and engaging with people. I started moving over to community health at the end of my sophomore year and by the time I was into my junior year, I absolutely loved community health because to me, it is the more hands on major. I loved how I got set up with an actual internship and how I got to be out in the field. And I just feel like for all prospective health care workers who want to work with individuals in the future, that we need to be in tune with the communities we want to work with, which is how I felt as a community health major.
How did the Margaret W. Bridwell Scholarship help you during your internship?
The scholarship has been such a great help for me. It's truly been such an amazing benefit to my life because my internship didn’t compensate me for parking or for gas or things like that. So the scholarship took care of those types of expenses for a long period of time. It just also helped me feel more comfortable because there were times I had to give up working to make an income for some of my internship duties. I'm glad that the scholarship was able to act as a backup for that.
What was your most memorable experience at the School of Public Health?
I had so much fun in HLTH420. Community health isn’t a small major but we are all accustomed to each other. So whenever it was presentation day in HLTH420, those were always the best days because you got to see the effort and the amount of time people put into their presentations.
It was always so fun to see those different aspects from everybody's presentation. We had so much energy for the presenter, but it was also engaging and exciting for us to learn from our classmates. We are the healthcare workers of tomorrow, so seeing them working on this material and to see how much effort they put in was amazing.
What advice would you give to other community health students?
Just don't be too hard on yourself. Be patient and just give things a try. If things don't end up going the way you want, learn from those prior attempts and try again. You can never know unless you try because even if it ends up being a no, you at least got that experience. There's more than enough time to figure out what you want to do in the future. College is the time to just try out all the different things you want to do.