Many roads lead to the Gillings School
July 3, 2023
At UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, students are at the heart of everything we do. But how do our outstanding students find their way here?
A large percentage of Gillings students didn’t originally plan to join the field of public health — often because they’d never heard of it. They wanted to help people and build a healthier world but weren’t sure how to achieve the greatest impact.
That’s where student outreach and recruitment come in.
Each year, faculty and staff from Gillings’ eight departments and central Student Affairs team support initiatives that educate high school and undergraduate students about the wide variety of career opportunities open to them in public health. These “pipelines” take the form of various efforts to recruit more students to the profession, often bringing alumni on board to share their experiences before and since graduation.
Whether these Gillings representatives speak about public health career paths at a higher education event, connect curious newcomers with current students for an inside look at our community or bring folks onto research teams for a summer-long experience, the goal is always to inform prospective students’ vague wish to “make a difference” with concrete details of exactly how public health improves lives.
“I know this is where life is calling me to be.”
Verdant Julius
“When I started college, I wanted to be a physician,” said Verdant Julius, an incoming Master of Public Health student who will begin classes at Gillings in the fall. “That’s the only option you really hear about when it comes to jobs in health care. But over time, as I got a deeper sense of how to serve my community through health advocacy and population-based initiatives, I realized I could help more people working in public health.”
The summer after his senior year as a double biology and psychology major at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Julius began his journey to the Gillings School through an internship with SOLAR — the Summer of Learning and Research program at UNC.
“I was reflecting on what I really wanted to achieve when I got great guidance from my faculty mentor, Dr. Folami Ideraabdullah, who is part of the Gillings School’s Department of Nutrition,” Julius shared. “She connected me with Dr. Michael O’Shea, who collaborates with Dr. Rebecca Fry in the Gillings School to study how environmental factors affect children’s health. He listened to my goals and set up an introduction with Dr. Fry — that support made me feel like the path to my future was clear. From then on, whenever I visited Gillings, what stuck out was the strong sense community as well as the huge impact the School makes in the real world by putting research into practice in local communities.”
After attending an open house and talking with current students, Julius applied and ultimately accepted an offer to study maternal and child health at the Gillings School and work in Dr. Fry’s lab.
“I’m a first-generation college student and first-generation American,” Julius says. “For me, the real value of the summer program was the people it put in my path. They supported me throughout the application process, answered every question I had and made me feel they were invested in my success as a person, not just a student. I feel genuinely happy to be joining Gillings because I know this is where life is calling me to be.”
“The people and the research opportunities brought me to Gillings.”
Dr. Mya Roberson
“I still remember meeting Trinnette Cooper at the exhibit hall for the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students meeting in San Antonio many years ago. She was part of the Gillings School’s Student Affairs team and is a huge reason why I’m here today,” said Mya Roberson, PhD, a social epidemiologist who earned her doctorate from the Gillings School in 2021 and has since returned as a faculty member. “I was studying public health as an undergraduate at Brown University and Trinnette was so enthusiastic about Gillings — even following up with me after the conference — that it made me want to visit campus.”
Once she did, Roberson realized how many resources she would be able to access to support her research into breast cancer disparities.
“After being admitted to Gillings, I realized I had a conflict and couldn’t attend Admitted Students Day,” she recalled. “The Office of Student Affairs and members of the Department of Epidemiology went above and beyond, planning a whole separate weekend visit for me so I could experience what life at Gillings would be like. In the end, it was the people and the research opportunities that brought me here. Everyone had such a warm touch, especially Associate Dean Charletta Sims Evans, and I knew I would find great support for my vision of improving cancer care delivery among Black patients in the South.”
As a faculty member, Roberson mentors several Black students who are part of her research team. She says the people who have taken her under their wing over the years have made all the difference in her career, and she’s more than happy to pay that care forward.
Outreach and recruitment at Gillings and UNC
Jonathan Earnest
“As these stories show, relationships matter. At the Gillings School, we are intentional about connecting with prospective students in a meaningful way,” said Director of Admissions Jonathan Earnest, MA, who also serves as a board member for UNC’s Health Professions Advising Office. “Through presentations and campus visits, expos and networking events, summer internships and other activities, we expose students to public health programs and career paths that align with their interests and passions — programs and career paths they may otherwise have not known existed. We demonstrate our care for students by promoting opportunities for them to explore their interests, supporting them through the admissions process and fostering a sense of belonging within our community even before they become Gillings students.”
Individual departments at the Gillings School also nurture and support prospective students, including through the Department of Biostatistics’ Mentorship and Advice for Prospective Students (MAPS) program, in which current students guide incoming students through the application process, or the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering’s new Future Researchers for Environmental Solutions and Health (FRESH) Outcomes program, which offers high school students a one-week introduction to environmental sciences. In July, Department of Health Behavior Chair Kurt Ribisl will host a summit on vaping prevention for 25 local youth leaders from across North Carolina, deepening their understanding of and networks within the public health sphere.
More broadly, UNC-Chapel Hill is home to many campus-wide pipeline programs that bring students in contacts with faculty from the Gillings School. Some of these offerings include:
- Fellowship for Exploring Research in Nutrition (FERN), which provides opportunities for undergraduate students from across the United States to engage in food and nutrition policy research
- Seeding Postdoctoral Innovators in Research & Education (SPIRE) for Undergraduates, which welcomes undergraduate students from partner institutions to UNC for a 10-week summer research experience
- 21st Century Environmental Health Scholars (21EH Scholars), which offers environmental health science research internships for undergraduate students from UNC and N.C. Central University.
- Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, which prepares undergraduate students for doctoral studies through involvement in research and other scholarly activities
- Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), which engages UNC undergraduates in nine weeks of research with a faculty adviser
- Partners Research Education Program (PREP), which provides training opportunities for undergraduates from N.C. Central University seeking careers in cancer health disparities
- Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), which offers structured research activities for undergraduate students interested in environmental health solutions
- Summer Undergraduate Pipeline (SUP), which provides additional networking opportunities and a culminating research symposium to summer research participants across Carolina
Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.
