Carol Mendez in Acting on a Grander Scale talks about her personal experience as an immigrant to the United States from Colombia. She talks about her sad life in Colombia including her mother’s death and her grandmother’s compassion towards their even poorer neighbors. She then goes on to tell us about her move to America as a young student and the struggles she and her family had with medical professionals due to the language barrier and how she used her skills in both languages to help first her family and then the larger community by translating for people seeking medical care throughout her young life. She also talks about her work for immigrant groups and helping in programs that try to help immigrants become American and contribute to and gain from American society. She is currently a medical student but discusses how hard it was for her to get started on the college process because of her immigrant status. She speaks a lot about helping other people and how this can be done on a small or grand scale. She says she is a testament to the help she has gotten and that there are many immigrants who could make something of themselves with a little help.
Courtney Turner in Finding the Face in Public Health Policy tells us about her experience working in public health and the ways in which she has experienced the right and wrong way to go about public health. She says she has worked a lot with AIDS patients and has been able to speak with them and see them first hand, an experience that many people who decide the way to deal with public health for them have not had. She says she worked with many people in closer contact with patients who had the knowledge of patients but were not the people in positions to make decisions. She says she felt that most of her learning was not from the classes she took but her actual work with people and hopes to be able to apply this in her future work and spread this type of knowledge with others.
Jan Oosting Kaminsky in Choosing Nursing talks about her career as a nurse and the factors that led to this decision. She says she felt when deciding to be a nurse the pressure of all the stereotypes of nursing because she has a college degree but she knew the importance of nursing for women and all people. She talks about how nursing is so important to our society and how nurses are needed and especially very educated nurses. She talks about the possibilities for people considering nursing and all the benefits nurses receive especially given the demand for nurse now and in the future. She then goes on to talk about the challenges of the idea of nursing for people because it is not perceived to be a great job which Kaminsky disputes but she does say that there are not enough schools for nurses which is an issue. She encourages nursing as a profession for not only the caring you can show to others but also the benefits of the job and the contribution to feminism that Kaminsky says the profession has.
The three readings all focus on jobs that one can have after a college education and how people can help others in a very big way with just a little caring and thoughtfulness. My favorite of these readings was Kaminsky’s because her profession has the ability to help all people who will face a medical situation at some point in their lives.
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