Esprit de Core

If you ask a recent MPH graduate of the Mailman School about the Core, expect a moment of respectful silence. Then maybe a furrowed brow. Then, perhaps, the faintest indication of a sly smile.

Not everyone finds the Core grueling. But few deny its status as the towering intellectual edifice of the Columbia MPH program.

“It’s a very comprehensive experience,” said Will Ueng, who is beginning his second year as an MPH Epidemiology student. “There are so many studios, so much coming at you, you need to be ready to switch gears fast, from thinking like an epidemiologist to thinking like a sociologist to thinking like a global health doc. I’m now able to communicate with people from every field, and I know that perspective is going to be useful.”

This innovative curriculum, launched in 2012, is also an endurance test for faculty. They deliver challenging lectures to students from all six public health disciplines. Many work to free themselves of departmental strictures that narrow intellectual focus. Their goal: to help students see the bigger picture of public health.

As the Core’s fourth year gets underway, a grant from the Columbia Provost’s Office is encouraging this impulse by helping students and faculty identify connections across curricula and enrich the pedagogical experience for both groups.

Amy Fairchild, professor of Sociomedical Sciences and an instructor in the Core’s Foundation studio from the beginning, sought a way to share what went on in her lectures with faculty responsible for other elements of the curriculum—and to keep a pulse on what went on in theirs.

“The Core is unlike anything currently available at other schools of public health," says Fairchild. “To continue innovating, faculty must seek new ways to help students knit their learning together, find novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas, and identify linkages among topics and questions public health poses.”

Her solution: Core WiRe. With the “Week-in-Review” embedded in its title, this new digital platform offers multiple ways for students and faculty to ruminate on this content. Course schedules, key readings, and themes are presented in a straightforward fashion, with opportunities to offer personal reflections, supplemental reading material, and insights from one studio that have instant and obvious resonance with content in another.

Fairchild continues: “The Ebola outbreak provides a prime example. It raised questions that touched on history, ethics, health systems, globalization, biostatistics, and human rights. Many faculty addressed Ebola in their studios, but we lacked a systematic means of sharing our approaches and students’ response that would have enriched understanding—ours and our students’.”

SMS doctoral student Caitlin McMahon, MPH ’12, serves as the Core WiRe’s editor. Having served as a teaching assistant in the Core since its first year, McMahon is well acquainted with its means of conveying foundation principles of public health.

“We’re not only looking at the tools of the trade, so to speak, but posing questions that make us active professionals in the discipline,” she says.

For Greg Freyer, associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences who numbers teaching in the Core among his most rewarding professional experiences, the more faculty members from across the aisle learn of each other’s lessons, the more enriching the experience for everyone involved. Beginning this semester, in a new role as director of Core Curricula, he is working with Core faculty to integrate each module and to give context to health disparities. 

“While descriptions of how adverse health outcomes disproportionally affect minority populations are common in Core lectures,” says Freyer, “students have been critical when these data are presented without context. Many have said that they came to Mailman to bring about change, but if they aren’t taught the drivers of health disparities, how do they go about fixing the problem?”

Another new development for the 2015-16 academic year will be “Today in the Core,” a colorful promotional series that features interesting elements from Core lectures displayed in the Allan Rosenfield Building lobby.

As for Will Ueng, he looks back on the Core as an intellectual basis for his current thinking. “The Core prepared me to learn new ideas and draw inferences in a way that completely informs my thinking today.”