Each spring we host Admitted Graduate Student Day, welcoming prospective students from around the world to experience life in Ann Arbor and at the School of Public Health. They meet faculty, tour our buildings, connect with current students, and get to know one another. It’s a remarkable day of discovery—and an opportunity for us to build connections that often last well beyond graduation.
Every prospective student arrives at a crossroads, each with a unique pathway and circumstances. But one question comes up again and again: “Why did you get into public health?”
We all have our own trajectories. But if we’re being honest, there is a common denominator.
For many of us, the most truthful answer is being a witness to hardship.
We have seen something in the world, in our community, in our family, and even in ourselves and thought, there must be a better way. The status quo was not an acceptable answer for us.
Out of that hardship comes resolve. And resolve leads to hope and determination and, finally, results that change lives for the better.
In this issue, you will read remarkable stories that embody this journey. Jennifer Garner shares her path from rural Michigan—where she watched her parents demonstrate what she calls “strategically applied stubbornness”—to becoming a professor whose food security research is deeply informed by her family’s experiences. Melissa Creary reflects on how her own sickle cell disease diagnosis became the foundation for two decades of work challenging us to understand that well-intentioned interventions will fall short without addressing deep structural inequities.
And Josh Knudten, an Epidemiology master’s student and member of our wrestling team, demonstrates what it means to excel in multiple demanding arenas while pursuing work in gene therapies inspired by treatments that change families’ lives.
These stories share a common thread: Each of these individuals witnessed something that demanded a response. They saw inequity, illness and complex systems failing the people who needed them most. Rather than accepting these realities, they chose to build their careers around changing them.
When public health gets attacked because we collectively have the gall to say this hardship does not need to persist, remember your why. Keep partnering. Keep building. Don’t just have the vision, work for it. That’s what we do in public health. That’s what we want our prospective students to know. That’s what we want the world to know.
Go Blue!
—Lynda Lisabeth, interim dean
