Rebecca Guerin on her path to health communication at NIOSH: transcript

Key points

• She studied Italian literature at Columbia and lived in Italy for several years.
• She studied international finance, worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then in commercial banking in Cincinnati.
• She returned to school for professional writing and health education.
• Science is broader than the image of a white lab coat and microscope.
• Health communicators consider where people live, their social environment, culture, ethnic background and age.
• Her role offers better work-life balance, and mentors who never told her she couldn't helped her career.

Chapters

1. 0:01From Italian literature to working abroad
2. 1:03Finance, banking and the turn to health education
3. 1:42What science and health communication really involve
4. 2:17Work-life balance in her role
5. 2:58The role of mentors

Full transcript

0:01I always wanted to go east and I wanted to go to an Ivy League school and I wanted to work and travel internationally and those were sort of big dreams for someone who came from pretty modest circumstances. I went to school in New York, I went to Columbia and I studied Italian literature, so I was studying Dante and medieval Italian literature, so that doesn't seem to have much relevance to my work today, but it was really a wonderful formation and then I I got to live in Italy for several years after that.

1:03I studied international finance and business, which was completely... A different pathway yet again. And from there I went to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Then I got married and came to Cincinnati and was looking for a little bit of a change. I worked in commercial banking for a while and that didn't seem to be the right fit. So I guess maybe going back to my communication roots, I decided to go back to school and that's where I got into my professional writing program and into health education.

1:42You know, when we think of scientists, or at least when I thought of scientists as a kid, I mean, I think of somebody in a starched white lab coat and using Bunsen burners and test tubes and peering through a microscope. But really, I think the field of science is much broader and encompasses a lot more activities than we might think. We're looking at a lot of things as health communicators. It's not just about developing messages, you know, quit smoking or do this thing to enhance your health.

2:17It's really looking at a broad range of human activities. So it's, you know, where do people live and, you know, what social environments do they interact? What is their culture, ethnic background? How old are they? Because that also influences how they receive health messages. I feel like I have a lot more opportunities for work-life balance in this role than I did in other jobs that I've worked in and I think that's just really important when you have small children and I feel fortunate too because I know that it's not always possible to have that balance and it's not perfect.

2:58mornings are really really ugly sometimes but you know compared to what it could be you know it's it it definitely it works most days the mentors in my life and I can really mark almost every stage of my professional and academic experience by the mentor or mentors I had at that time of life I had all these crazy ideas and nobody ever told me, no, you can't do that because, sure, why not? So I never had that internal message of somehow I was limited by my circumstances or that wouldn't be possible for me.

3:50So I think that was always very helpful.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Science Speaks - Talking to Women in Science (Rebecca, Health Communication Specialist).webm by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (2013-11-04), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.