By Jon Stemmle
Recently, I was given an amazing opportunity. I got to see the impact of what we do every day through a student perspective.
Since the HCRC began, a critical part of our efforts has been working with students. Although it was typically graduate students, we’ve never turned anyone away who was interested in learning about health or science communication. We’ve worked with students from departments ranging from graphic design to medicine and journalism to physics. Each semester we typically have several students working on our grant and contract projects in various capacities. The one thing we preach is that it’s a two-way street – we have tasks we need them to do, but we also want them to leave our Center with the experience and knowledge they sought.
Over the years, more and more students asked to work for the HCRC in order to get the hands-on, practical experience that wasn’t available in the classroom. In order to handle this demand, in the spring of 2011 I began teaching a class about Strategic Health and Science Communication. In this first class one of my students was an undergraduate biochemistry major named Derek Benham. Derek also happened to be in the first group of science students I was working with on our SciXchange project, where we taught undergraduate science students how to communicate with the public through the written word, video, photos and social media.
Now I’ve worked with dozens of students in the last year. I’ve treated them as the professionals they are working to become and treated them as equally as I know how. I think that’s why I was so surprised when a letter arrived in my campus mailbox inviting me to the Mizzou ’39 Award ceremony.
I had never heard of the Mizzou ’39 Award and I learned that it was an honor bestowed each year by the Mizzou Alumni Association to 39 seniors “outstanding seniors for their academic achievement, leadership and service to the university and community.” Each student was asked to name the faculty or staff member who had made an impact on them in their collegiate career and I was the person whose name Derek wrote on his Mizzou ’39 application. I had known Derek for a year at this point, but always figured I was one of many people at MU who had helped him during his time on campus.
Given his career path toward a career in medicine, he could have chosen any number of people like a biology professor or the scientist who runs the lab he works in or others. Instead, he chose me, a journalism guy. When I asked him why, he talked about the value of communicating with the public and, in his immediate future, with the patients he will treat as a doctor.
This brings me to the night of February 11. Sitting at a banquet table in the Reynolds Alumni Center that night with his family and his fiancée, and seeing the other students with their mentors was a humbling experience. For him to include me, a guy whose last science class was chemistry in high school, as part of this ceremony was a stunning turn and something I won’t soon forget.
As I walked out into the cold February night air after the ceremony, I realized that this experience showed that the HCRC approach does work. That breaking down the walls of academia, the walls that can divide majors and schools, allows someone like me to impact a student like Derek that I never would have met under normal circumstances. I feel re-energized about what we do every day at the HCRC with our students and want to continue breaking down those walls. Only by continuing to reach across disciplines in our daily work can I, and my colleagues in the HCRC, make an impression on students that resonates beyond the walls of our office and the borders of the MU campus.
And really, isn’t that what being at a university is supposed to be all about.