Colette Kirkpatrick is a fourth-year Global Health and Communications double major, and is one of the representatives for the Undergraduate Student Advisory Committee for the Global Health Program. She was drawn into the UCSD Global Health Department for its field experience requirement, and was able to pursue her passion for global health by applying herself over the past year at UCSF's CARE Registry.
CARE is the Collaborative Approach for AAPI Research and Education (CARE) in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). The ultimate goal of CARE is to address the gap and reduce disparities in ADRD research participation among AAPI through the creation of a registry of 10,000 AAPI who are interested in participating in various types of ADRD research.
For this internship, Colette worked with Dr. Van Ta Park, as well as other college aged interns, in order to recruit AAPI into the CARE Registry. This involved creating community outreach materials, conducting outreach presentations, and analyzing participant data.
Colette's main role was originally working with Japanese and Chinese communities, but is now overseeing the creation of the CARE Ambassador Program as its president. From the various projects and people she has worked with at CARE, Colette was able to learn skills about everything from R coding, to program management.
Creating the CARE Ambassador Program became a much less daunting task after being a part of the Global Health Reps team. As a Global Health Rep, Colette helped launch the mxntor/mxntee program. She used a lot of the lessons she learned from her mxntorship program and applied them to launching the CARE Ambassador Program.
One of the biggest challenges Colette faced during her field experience was working remotely. She began her field experience last year at the beginning of quarantine, and has worked almost a full year of at UCSF without ever meeting her coworkers.
It often makes me feel disconnected from the work and my colleagues, but everyone is doing their best to get to know each other virtually. It's getting better but I can't wait to work in person this summer!
Outside of her primary work at CARE, Colette is a member of the Chinese outreach team, which plans outreach events and presentations to engage with the Chinese community about CARE. Much of her time at these outreach presentations is spent providing technical help.
For Colette, working with the CARE Registry has been extremely rewarding, and she would recommend this field experience opportunity to any Global Health student.
I'll never forget what it feels like to be surrounded by people who really care about what they're working on. The people I get to work with genuinely love what the CARE Registry does and are willing to work above and beyond for the betterment of the team. The CARE Registry opened my eyes to what my ideal working environment would look like.