A Minha Mascara. Joao Carlos Barros

I entered the MPH program with over six years of experience working in a variety of settings from hepatitis prevention to early childhood education; from research on HIV and homelessness to direct service work with incarcerated parents and their families; from training lay health workers to teaching poetry, writing and parenting in jails and prison.  At the time I enrolled, there was no part of my life’s work or passion that I wanted to abandon. Public health drew me in as a way to cobble together all of my disparate (yet linked) interests and areas of expertise in an academic and vocational context. As an interdisciplinary field of study, public health allows for the mingling and overlapping of multiple knowledge branches. As a practice, it applies many different types of knowledge in the promotion, protection and restoration of human and environmental health. In three years of study, I have come to see that the real power of public health as a discipline, a vocation and a concept is in its connectivity – in its integral pertinence to every dimension of our lives and livelihood.