Preview for next quarter!

[Tanwe Shende]

Hi my lovely ghU-ers!

I hope you're all getting some ZZZ's and eating lots of yummy food! I really miss seeing all your smiley faces!
But I'm super excited about next quarter!! And I wanted to give you guys some updates/ food for thought before our first meeting!

Big things:

(1) GHAW/WDSJ... Okay, so next quarter in February, we will have World Day of Social Justice (WDSJ)- I think I told you guys about this briefly- but essentially, this is a day that the National Office aka.NatO (cl3v3r, no?) uses to bring all GlobeMed chapter together by giving all the chapters a task or question and having us document it. That's a really odd description, but essentially NatO will tell us what to do. (I'll show you examples from previous years at our first meeting!) The second part of this is that WDSJ falls during Global Health Awareness Week (GHAW) that is a week celebrating Global Health organized by David Geffen and this year one our lovely GlobeMed alumni (Catherine) is on the board for planning GHAW!  So we will be attending a dinner during that week with some crazy cool keynote speaker! But on top of that, I wanted to do something on campus to spread GlobeMed love!! I know I've told you guys about "the big poo " that UT-Austin did so think of cool BIG things like that, that we could do! I  just want you guys to brainstorm now cause we'll have about a month to plan everything when we get back!

(2) Movie Screening... So last year at Summit (which is the big, national GlobeMed conference held at Northwestern in April which you ALL should be applying for), we saw an AWESOME preview for a documentary called "They Go to Die" by a Yale epidemiologist named Jonathan Smith. To summarize things briefly, he was studying the prevalence of HIV and TB among mineworkers in South Africa and Swaziland, and found the deaths caused by this combination alarmingly high, so he went to investigate this problem. He documented the journey of 4 of these miners to highlight a problem and it's AMAZING! Here's a link to the website for the film (http://theygotodie.com/). My brief blurb does not do the film justice! All of us that went last year were OBSESSED with him! So.... Caroline, Leah and I have been in contact with him and over summer, he was finishing final edits on the film and agreed to screen it at UCLA during Spring Semester (ie. Winter or Spring quarter)! We're hoping he'll be able to do it this quarter, so I just want to let you guys know this is something that's coming soon and we might be able to co-program with a GenRep or another group to make it big! But I want you all to know that this is something EVERYONE will have to attend and we will REALLY need to make it big! So  start sharing the link with your friends, create some buzz and get pumped!!

Smaller things:

(3) Starting this quarter, I want to start having short weekly meeting to make sure you guys are ready prepared before Thursday meeting. I know you guys are all crazy busy, and trust me, I'm in the same boat, but there's definitely been a lack of communication between us and I really don't want that to be an issue going forward. So, look at your schedules and come up with times that you guys will be free to meet up for about 30-40 minutes! We can do it on campus or at my apartment on Midvale, whatever works best for you guys! Just start thinking about that and we'll set the time and place during the first meeting!

(4) You guys are going to lead ghU! I know I talked about this last quarter, but it's starting this quarter!! After our first meeting, you guys will be the ones who lead meeting! So look at your calendars/ syllabuses and come up with a list of weeks that work best for you. Order them from the week you want most to least and be ready to give it to me (via email) by Friday of first week! I'll then assign out weeks and tell you what part of the track you'll be covering! During your assigned week, we will meet up so I can help you create a powerpoint and work out the activities you want to do. You will also have to lead that weeks short ghU weekly meeting (the one that I was talking above... ie #3) and tell the rest of the group what their responsible for doing as small group facilitators. 

(5) Lastly, our first meeting back is going to be a little different than normal... Caroline and I have been talking about it and I'll give you guys more updates as it gets closer but we're probably going to have story telling time and play an activity similar to choices (aka. the activity from the very first ghU last quarter)!! 

Sorry for sending you guys such a longgggg email but I wanted ya'll to know EVERYTHING!!!

Hope you guys are having a great break!

As usual, just send me a short reply saying you got the email plz!!!!!

Lots of GlobeMed love,

Tanwe

PS. IF YOU GUYS AREN'T READING THE GLOBEMED WINTER BOOK CLUB BOOK, YOU TOTALLY SHOULD!!! IT'S SOOOOO GOOD!! I'M OBSESSED!! It's called "Mighty be our powers" by Leymah Gbowee and it's probably at your local library!

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Tanwe Shende

UCLA Class of 2014 l Department of Biology
GlobeMed l GlobalHealthU Coordinator

David Geffen School of Medicine l Pediatrics Research Assistant