Professional Exploration: 15-minute Blog Post

Yuchen Tong 11/4/19

This post is about how my projects for different classes related to my professional exploration topic. Childhood Obesity has always been one of my interested area, since I got surprised by its complexity when I took a writing seminar on this topic in Sophomore year. And surprisingly, myself also have very high cholesterol for unknown reason. I doubt it is about my unhealthy diet, although I don't look like my cholesterol is 7 times higher than standard. So this semester, my two other classes are kind of related to this topic, too. My community partner for "Communication by Design" class is "BAWSI", Bay Area Women's Sports Initiative. This is an organization devotes to provide underprivileged girls with access to sports activities. Their target group is largely overlapped with children who are at high potential risk of childhood obesity. They live in unsafe neighborhood where they are not free to play around. Their parents can't commit much time, money or accompany to support them enjoying sports activities. They may have an unbalanced diet in school or at home. They may suffer from mental problems... I talked to one board member of BAWSI last week. She is a pediatrician in Stanford's hospital, expertise in childhood obesity, and also a former Ivy-league soccer player. She believes BAWSI is exerting positive impact on eliminating childhood obesity by promoting after-school physical activities. I plan to talk with her about this topic a bit more next week. Other than this, my final project for "Form" class will be about healthcare. I would like to narrow it down to childhood obesity if I could. Then I can understand this topic in diverse perspectives.