Public Health Professional and Hospital Administrator

>> My name is Val Reagan [phonetic], I'm a second year doctoral student in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health. I am graduate and teaching assistant, so I teach graduate master courses and next semester I'll be teaching undergraduate courses at the school. I have always been a part of the YMCA even from a child and so I started as a counselor in trainer and then work as a counsellor and over the time when you look at the YMCA's, versus inner city versus more suburban ones, you still see that there is a commonality amongst children whether they feel loved or unloved, or just want to someone to talk to and play with and make friends. And so the YMCA is really where I got started in understanding how different children operate and then also realizing that their parents have a huge influence over their mannerism and how they react to adverse situations. I liked working with children and thought I would work with children, however there was a time where I had to work and go to school, go to undergrad, so I was working full time and going to school. Part time and then full time some quarters and I started working at the Chicago Medical Society as file records clerk and they quickly promoted me up through the ranks and that's how I learned about the organized side of medicine, you know in Chicago and then I started working at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago as an administrator over the Department of Neurology and this just kind of fell in lap, all of these different aspects from medical education to research grants to running medical clinics, managing physicians which is like herding a bunch of Siamese cats through a door, you know so I kind of fell into it but I used all of my life skills and I constantly kept reading to learn more about the field so that I knew I was very young when I took the job so I wanted to always be prepared and that's how I kind of fell into hospital administration basically. First I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor and so I went through the application process and all of the rigorous exams, pre-med courses and during the interview process in talking with some physicians, when I telling about my personal statement and what I really wanted to do which was build comprehensive medical clinics in developing countries they said, you know you really need to consider public health it may be an area of interest to you and you seemed to be more focus on populations versus individual health care and I'm a strategic planner and they said that is absolutely needed in public health.