One Month, One Step

By Laura Borkenhagen, 1st-year Master of Science in Global Health Candidate

I’d love to see the look on my face as a college freshman if I told her what I was doing right now: sitting at a bus stop in Durham, North Carolina waiting to go home and do coursework for my classes at the Duke Global Health Institute.

I imagine the response would be something like, “Me? A quirky farm girl from rural Minnesota at Duke? What is global health?” 

It wasn’t until my senior year of undergrad that I even thought of pursuing global health. To put that into perspective, that was one year ago. I entered my undergraduate career with the intention of going to medical school to be a forensic pathologist. Slowly but surely I started to veer off of that path toward pathology and then microbiology and then public health. 

All of these path changes, however, were internal. I rarely told anyone about my changes of heart. I didn’t want to admit to that medical school wasn’t my dream anymore, because I didn’t want to feel like I failed. I took all of the pre-med courses. I even suffered through the MCAT the summer after my junior year, but as fall of my senior year rolled around, I had to make choices. 

I finally admitted to myself that medical school wasn’t the next step. The problem was, I didn’t know what else the next step could be. All I really knew for sure was that I wanted to do research, because that was a big part of my undergraduate career. I worked in a microbiology lab and a zooarchaeology lab, and I did fieldwork in Nepal for a gender, women and sexuality studies project. 

Ultimately, it was my love of multidisciplinary work that led me to global health. I love collaboration and looking at things in ways that no one else has before. That’s why DGHI seemed like the place for me.

Now I’m a little over a month into my MSc-GH coursework. While I love my cohort and my courses, I’ll admit that I’ve had my doubts about whether I should’ve come here straight out of undergrad or even at all. 

During an interview, I was asked why I decided to come to Duke to pursue global health, when I very well could’ve stayed in Minnesota on the farm or at another job in my small town. I didn’t have an answer. I knew that’s not where I wanted to be, but I was unable to articulate a particular reason for being at DGHI at this very moment in my life. A month later, I’m finally getting closer to putting it to words.

My classmates and I have had a lot of great opportunities at the Triangle Global Health Consortium conference and the DGHI 10th Anniversary Symposium to hear leaders in global health discuss the Sustainable Development Goals and address the predicaments we face as a discipline. 

From these discussions, it’s clear that we have a huge task ahead of us, and that thought is incredibly daunting. My classmates and I are having a hard enough time with the seemingly minor challenges in our own lives; already in the last month we’ve faced difficulties with classes, homesickness and finding research assistantships. 

Many of us have admitted to doubting our decision to be here pursuing our master’s degree at some point. But when we’re at a lecture, reading articles or discussing coursework, and I see my friends’ eyes light up at the mention of mental health, surgery, nutrition education, traditional medicine, infectious disease—whatever their specialty—I know this is where our passions lie. 

I’m still combing through possible career paths involving health care access disparities, maternal and child health and disease prevention research, but I think this array of interests is a good sign that I’m where I need to be—even if I can’t pinpoint a specific passion at this point.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.” Right now I think many of us can’t see the whole staircase, but we all know we want to see change in the world. 

Here’s to taking that first step.