What I learned from my students

Hope for the future

She wrote it as a letter to her grandfather.

He didn’t think the flu vaccine was worth it… and ended up hospitalized for four days, struggling to breathe, his recovery complicated by Parkinson’s. Instead of citing statistics, she wrote him a public letter, grounded in her voice, her love, and her desire that he stay alive. She explained in plain language how even an imperfect vaccine was “good enough.” But she also wrote it because she suspected she wasn’t the only one in this situation.

That was her final assignment in my new course. And it was the best public health communication I’d read in a long time.

I’m a professor on leave—or the kind of leave where you think you’ve stepped away from academia, and then the Dean of Yale School of Public Health calls and asks you to teach a course on scientific communication. I didn’t have the time, but I said yes anyway. Partly because I couldn’t wait to co-teach with Naria Halliwell, a rockstar in mass media. And partly because I had never had a single hour of training in scientific translation, engagement, or communication during my entire education. That needs to change.

So I walked in thinking I had something to teach these students. I came out having learned a ton, realizing just how much systems need to change—and with a newfound hope.